이연법인세를 이용한 이익 조정 행위 측정에 관한 연구 : 부채비율 감소 기업을 중심으로

After IMF crisis in December 1997, Korean firms were required to reduce the debt ratio at below 200%. Under these pressure, we can posit that the firms might have strong incentives to manage earnings in an effort to reduce the debt ratio. This paper aims to examine whether the firms engaged earnings management other than the means of asset revaluation or issuing new stocks to meet stringent debt requirements. In addition, this paper verifies whether deferred tax expense(DTE) is an effective proxy to gauge earnings management as well as conventional discretionary accruals (DA). To achieve our purposes, we categorized earnings management group (EM=1) where the firms are likely to engage in earnings management due to high debt ratio. The results are as follows: First, we found that DA (measured by revised Jones model(Dechow et, al., 1995)) exhibited significantly positive coefficient with EM, proving that the firms having strong needs to reduce debt ratio employ earnings management. Second, DTE showed significantly positive relations with EM, thus we can conclude that firms engaged earnings management using DTE. Lastly, to further support DTE as means of earnings management, we decomposed DTE into 23 detailed items to verify which specific items are used to manage earnings. The results confirms that current deferred tax expense which is realizable within near-term is significantly related to EM. This supports our hypothesis that firms used current deferred tax items rather than long-term deferred tax items to mitigate the impact of debt ratio increases arising from earnings management using DTE.