기업 경영전략이 신용등급에 미치는 영향

This study investigates the effect of business strategy on credit rating. Defender firms in terms of business strategy focus on efficiency in production and maintain narrow and stable product lines, which results in limited new product development and technology. On the contrary, prospector firms pursue being market innovative leaders and so develop new products and technology, which consequently leads to large investment and so greater uncertainty in future performance. Creditors only receive principal payment and promised interest even when firms generate sufficient cash flows, while they can lose the entire amount when firms cannot generate sufficient cash flows. So, creditors have more concerns about firms’ downside risk than upside potential. Therefore, prospector strategy which are likely to have both downside risk and upside potential is a credit-harming factor. We conduct empirical analysis, using Korean listed firms from 2000 to 2016. First, we examine whether prospector firms have more volatile future performance which underlies our hypothesis development, and find prospector firms having greater uncertainty of future performance. In our main analysis, we provide evidence that prospector firms have lower credit rating than defender firms, consistent with our prediction. This study contributes to prior literature in showing whether and how business strategy affects credit ratings and suggesting business strategy as one of nonfinancial factors which affect credit ratings.