노동조합이 기업의 공정공시에 미치는 영향에 대한 연구

This study examines the relationship between labor union and the frequency of information disclosed under fair disclosure system. Specifically, we investigate whether the presence of union (bargaining power of unions) is related to the frequency of disclosure. There exist two different perspectives on the role of unions in a union-management relationship: a partner for goal alignment or a residual claimant. The former view emphasizes that management can achieve effective labor-management cooperation and goal alignment with unions by sharing information (Palmer 1977; Foley and Maunders 1977). However, the latter perspective stresses that unions, through collective bargaining, redistribute a larger portion of profits to their members and consequently decrease firm profitability. In other words, in a situation where the firm and the union share the profits, the union would attempt to maximize the utility of its members by increasing its share of the firm's surplus. Therefore, firms with a unionized workforce should have an incentive to hide or misrepresent their true position to take advantage of the negotiation (Reynolds et al. 1998). In this regard, studies have suggested that unionized firms carry out a lower level of investments (Bronars and Deere 1993; Fallick and Hassett 1999), use accounting choice to influence labor negotiations (DeAngelo and DeAngelo 1991; D'Souza et al. 2001; Yoon and Ko 2006), increase debt (Bronars and Deere 1991; Matsa 2010), or hold smaller cash reserves (Klasa et al. 2009). However, there is little evidence concerning whether a firm conceals information to its union except Hilary (2006) which finds empirical evidence of a positive relationship between strong organized labor forces and information asymmetry. Thus, the purpose of our study is to enhance understanding on this issue by examining the relationship between labor union and the frequency of disclosure. We investigate corporate disclosures following the adoption of regulation fair disclosure of the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) in November 2002. Disclosures under this rule are voluntary in terms of that the firm has discretion over whether to release the information or not (Shim et al. 2010). Therefore, this provides a good environment to investigate a firm's strategy on disclosure when they have an organized labor force. We develop our hypotheses based on two competing effects of union. On the one hand, managers of a firm may have an incentive to reduce information when the uncertainty concerning managerial objectives is higher. Strong labor provides this environment because managers act differently in the presence of different parties that have potentially conflicting goals. For example, while managers would manipulate earnings upward in general, those facing strong union would manipulate earnings downward, and thereby misrepresent their true position to be better off both in the market and in labor negotiation. From this perspective, unionized firms may have an incentive to minimize disclosure and increase uncertainty in order to increase their bargaining power in collective bargaining. On the other hand, unions argue that not only they are residual claimant but also they enhance the information environment by discipline firms to report the firm's financial condition faithfully and to disclose that information to the market. In addition, information required by union is overlapped with the regulation fair disclosure, and KSE's guideline propose firm to disclose information that is internally distributed if it is a subject of regulation fair disclosure. The more strong the union is, the bigger this effect will be. Therefore, from the second perspective, it is expected that the frequency of disclosure is higher in the presence of strong union. We do not predict whether the relationship between labor union and the frequency of disclosure is positive or negative because there are competing arguments. On the one hand, as we discussed above, a strong union could reduce the frequency of disclosure because firms have an incentive to minimize information flow both to them and to the market. On the other hand, a strong union could demand for more information disclosure both to them and to the market resulting in a higher frequency of the disclosure. Following these two competing arguments, we posit our hypotheses in null form that the presence of union (bargaining power of unions) is not related to the frequency of disclosure. Our sample consists of 1,681 firm-year observations in the manufacturing industry for the period 2003-2008. All firms are listed on the KSE. Using this sample, we find that unionized firms have lower frequency of fair disclosure compared to non- unionized firms. Second, we find that union’s bargaining power is positively related to the frequency of fair disclosure. In sum, this result implies that the existence of a union reduces the firm’s level of fair disclosure, but in a unionized firm, the stronger the union, the higher frequency of fair disclosure because union can play a monitoring role. This study has implications to practitioners and academics on labor negotiations and disclosure. In addition, we try to eliminate the endogeneity problem that arises from the characteristic differences between unionized firms and non-unionized firms using Heckman’s two-step regression (1979). Finally, the paper utilizes firm- level union data uniquely available in Korea.