Abstract

From the perspective of the domestic capital markets, there have been few researches on the financial characteristics of the firms belonging to the KOSDAQ(Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotation) market, in comparison with those of the firms in the KOSPI. This study has performed three hypothesis tests to obtain the following results: By employing the ‘panel data’ analysis, it was found that, for the book-value based leverage, all of the six proposed IDVs were statistically significant as the financial determinants of leverage, across the two proxies measuring profitability (i.e., PFT and ROE), while all of the IDVs except VOLATILITY, also seemed to be the attributes to explain the market based dependent variable in the model with the PFT. Moreover, there may be statistically significant (structural) changes (or quasi-experiment) ) between the pre- and post-U.S. financial crisis in the year of 2008, when measured the leverage with the market-value basis with utilizing the Chow F-test. Finally, based upon the logistic regression results, the probability for a firm to be classified into the Prime section in the KOSDAQ market, may be higher, as its profit margin and asset turnover increase.