최고경영자 교체 빈도와 이익의 질

CEO turnover is a critical event that could cause the changes in a firm's operating, investing and financing activities as well as in the accounting system of the firm. Existing studies have documented that earnings management and discretionary write-offs are associated with CEO turnover. Using a sample of non-financial firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange over the 1994~2004 period, we investigate the relation between quality of earnings and CEO turnover ratios. The test results can be summarized as follows. First, we ran multiple regressions to analyze the relation between the quality of earnings and CEO turnover controlling for the frequency of negative earnings, magnitude of sales volatility, operating cycle, firm size, etc. The result shows that CEO turnover ratio has a significantly negative relation with the quality of earnings. With a restricted sample which includes only firms with at least one CEO change during 1994~2004 period, the negative relation between CEO turnover ratio and the quality of earnings turns out to be more pronounced. Second, we used 2SLS (two-stage least squares) to consider the simultaneous association between the quality of earnings and CEO turnover ratio. While the CEO turnover ratio affects the quality of earnings, CEO turnover ratio might be affected by the quality of earnings. The result of 2SLS shows that there exists an interaction between the quality of earnings and CEO turnover ratio. This provides the evidence that high CEO turnover ratio results in low quality of earning and high quality of earning results in low CEO turnover ratio. This study contributes to the research area related to CEO turnover by showing the negative relationship between CEO turnover ratio and the quality of earnings. It also contributes to the research area in earnings quality by adding CEO turnover ratio variable to the factors influencing earnings quality.