회계정보 유용성의 추세변화와 원인분석

It is argued that balance sheets fail to reflect firms' true financial position because current accounting principles do not allow firms to capitalize intangible expenditures as incurred. Given that there is mixed evidence in previous studies on whether financial statements provide more useful information over time, this study investigates the role of intangible expenditures and losses in explaining the change in usefulness of accounting information under current GAAP.As intangible expenditures are rapidly increased, valuation of intangible-intensive firms is so difficult that information asymmetry or transaction cost for those firms is quite high. More importantly, when market participants do not properly evaluate such firms' intangible expenditures, their incentives for investing them will be reduced. This might prevent high-tech firms from growing continuously.We find that over the past twenty years, Korean firms' research and development expenditures have increased faster than sales and more firms have experienced losses and that usefulness of accounting information has been decreased in 1990s. Empirical analysis shows such decrease in the usefulness is attributable to (i) increases in research and development expenditures and (ii) increases in the number of loss firms. Further, major revision of Korean GAAP in 1998 regarding intangible expenditures affects significantly value relevance of intangible expenditures, both expensed and capitalized research and development expenditures. These evidence suggests that accounting for intangible expenditures be carefully revised, incorporating empirical results.