계속감사기간과 부채조달비용과의 관련성

This paper examines whether auditor tenure influences the cost of debt-financing and whether separation of management from ownership has an effect on the relation between auditor tenure and the cost of debt-financing. This paper uses a sample of non-financing firms which are listed in Korea Exchange Market and issue general corporate bonds from 2000 to 2006. Our main findings are as follows:First, consistent with our first hypothesis that auditor tenure is positively valued by capital market participants, we find that auditor tenure is negatively and significantly correlated with the cost of debt-financing. Credit rating agencies assign higher ratings to the firms with longer auditor tenure and investors require lower rates of return as the length of auditor tenure increases. This result is consistent with the auditor-expertise hypothesis which says that the length of the auditor-client relationship provides information on the audit quality. That is, longer auditor tenure may lessen the information asymmetry between the auditor and the client, which in turn could lead to higher audit quality. Secondly, we investigate whether separation of management from ownership has an impact on the relation between auditor tenure and cost of debt-financing. Our empirical result shows that the economic consequences of auditor tenure are not larger for non-owner firms. The effect of auditor tenure on the decrease of the cost of debt-financing is not stronger for non-owner firms with higher agency costs resulting from separation of management from ownership.