Research On Investment Behavior Of Agriculture-listed Companies Of China

As the key driver of the company's growth and future cash flow growth, Investment decision-making is also an important starting point for the company's financial policies. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of influencing factors, the result of the decision-making process is not always reflecting the enterprise value maximization. However, it will come into being the so-called "undercapitalization" and "overcapitalization" behavior which seriously undermines the value of the company, hampers the development of the enterprises.China is a agricultural country, and the agricultural companies are the leaders of agricultural industrialization. But considering the quantity,total assets and equity-scale, the share of the agriculture-listed companies in the whole stock market is less than 6%; And more than half of the agriculture-listed companies behave various forms of diversification, the overall return on investment is low, perhaps there are non-efficient investment behaviors which may have hindered the healthy development of the companies.The first step of the research is to measure the investment behaviors of the agriculture-listed companies and validate is there any behavior of "undercapitalization" and "overcapitalization" existed. The next step is to analyze the main influencing factors of the "undercapitalization" and "overcapitalization" based on the result of the first step, thereby providing some academic guidance and decision-making references for improving the investment behaviors of the agriculture-listed companies and establishing relevant policies in the country.The main conclusions of this study are: From 2004 to 2008, the ideal investment size is 6.05% of the beginning total net asset value for the agriculture-listed companies under the perfect market conditions; but in the real world there is information asymmetry and the impact of agency problems, 64% of the total number of the companies acted annual "undercapitalization", the investment behaviors of these companies support asymmetric information theory, non-efficient scale of investment is negatively correlated to the company size and management expense ratio, and that is positively correlated to the asset-liability ratio and large shareholder's equity occupancy rate; 36% of the company's were annual "overcapitalization", the investment behaviors of these companies support the free cash flow agency theory, non-efficient scale of investment is positively correlated to the corporate internal cash flow and capital storage. The liabilities did not play the corresponding role of governance. Finally, according to the results of the research, the paper gives some suggestions to improve the investment behaviors for the agriculture-listed companies.