벤처기업의 연구개발비 감축과 미래 경영성과에 관한 연구

Venture firms are knowledge and technology based and depend heavily on research and development for their survival and growth. Thus, R&D expenditures are critical to the success of venture firms. Prior studies document that firms cut R&D expenditures or/and capitalize their R&D costs to manage their earnings. There is little evidence on the consequences of earnings management. This study examines whether R&D cuts of venture firms are negatively related to future financial performance and how the capitalization accounting policy is related to future financial performance. The sample consists of firms on the Kosdaq from 1999 to 2007. The analyses are conducted by comparing venture firms to non－venture firms. The empirical results are follows. The R&D cuts of non－venture firms are not related to their future performance, but the R&D cuts of venture firms are negatively related to their future performance. These results indicate that R&D costs are important to venture firms and R&D cost cuts are detrimental to their earnings power. Firms with R&D capitalization policies show lower future performance than firms with R&D expensing policies, indicating that accounting choices on R&D do not reflect the economics of R&D costs, but are used as one of tools to manage earnings. The results of this study may be helpful for government policy makers and firm managers to establish R&D policy for venture firms, for auditors and financial analysts to evaluate venture firms.