코스닥기업의 이익관리가 신용평가에 미치는 영향

The firms in Korean Securities Dealers´ Automated Quotation(KOSDAQ) have more incentives of earnings management, especially earnings enlargement than listed firms in Korea Stock Exchange(KSE). KOSDAQ firms increase their earnings to decrease capital cost and to guide investors’ concern in the good appearance under the existing conditions of less tight financial disclosure system than KSE. This earnings management tends to distort many naive investors. The purse of this study is to examine the influence of credit grade that may control earnings management in KOSDAQ. The study sets hypotheses that credit grades evaluate earnings management negatively in KOSDAQ. To test the hypotheses, the regression models include credit grades(dependant variables, GRADE), the discretionary accruals(main independent variables, DA) and other control variables(net income, firm size, debt ratio, audit opinion etc). The test sample consists of 2,325 firm-year data, selected from the KOSDAQ listed companies of 2000～2003. The study concludes the followings: First, correlation coefficient of GRADE and DA is -0.09(significant level, p<0.01). Secondly, DA is lower in good GRADE granted group than bad group(t statistics 3.443, p<0.001). Finally, regression models show that DA has negatively effect on the credit grades regardless of explanatory power of control variables.