수익비용대응의 변화: 재무구조의 영향에 대한 분석

We examine the change in the relation between revenue and expense by using the time series framework and suggest substantial changes in financial structure as its fundamental reason. Financial information users usually pay attention to earnings information as a measure of a firm’s financial performance. In addition, the earnings information is a key performance measure for managers(Graham et al. 2005). Given that earnings are calculated by subtracting the “matched” expense from current revenue, thus, both investigating the time trend of matching between revenue and expense, and explaining its fundamental drivers are meaningful attempts to understand the main component of earnings. However, due to recent changes in accounting standards toward the perspective of statement of financial position, the role of the matching principle, which is based on income statement perspective, has been weakened. Dichev and Tang(2008) find that a poor matching between revenue and expense reduces the contemporaneous correlation between revenue and expense, increases the earnings volatility, decreases the earnings persistence, and causes a negative autocorrelation in earnings changes. Donelson et al.(2011) document that these changes are attributable to large special items and that large special items occur due to economic events rather than the adoption of new accounting standards. Decline in the association between revenue and expense is also documented in studies using Korean firms. Similar to Dichev and Tang(2008), Paek(2011a) finds that the contemporaneous relation between revenue and expense has declined during the sample period. However, Paek(2011a) is more focused on identifying the decline in the relation between revenue and expense among Korean firms rather than investigating the fundamental reason of this trend. Therefore, the investigation of its fundamental reason would be an important task on the matching principle research. Our empirical result shows a decline in the contemporaneous relation between revenue and expense over the sample period. When we decompose the total expense into five components (cost of goods sold; selling, general, and administrative expenses; nonoperating revenues; nonoperating expenses; and tax expenses), we find that the nonoperating expense is the most critical component weakening the revenue- expense matching. Next, we find that net interest expense has the most significant impact on the trend of nonoperating expense. We note that poor revenue-expense matching disappears in the subsample excluding observations with large interest income or expense. We also show that the revenue-expense matching is not weakened after excluding net interest expense from total expense. In contrast, the positive association between net interest expense and revenue in the earlier part of sample period becomes weaker and eventually turns to negative in the latter part of sample period. Based on these results, we infer that the decline in the contemporaneous relation between revenue and expense is attributable to the drastic change in leverage. Before the financial crisis around 1998, Korean firms relied on debt financing to fund their growth. As a result, firms with high net interest expense are more likely to have high sales growth in the earlier part of the sample period. However, after an experience of financial crisis, Korean firms tend to rely on the positive cash flow to fund investments rather than debt issuance(Kang and Suh 2006). Thus, the association between the revenue and net interest expense has weakened over the sample period. In the supplementary analysis, we examine the role of leverage ratio in the revenue- expense matching. We show that the poor revenue-expense matching has disappeared in the subsample of firms without the reduction in leverage ratio over the sample period, while there is a significant decline in the subsample of firms with the reduction in leverage ratio. This suggests that the change in leverage ratio has a detrimental effect on revenue-expense matching. Our finding indicates that the change in capital structure and the funding source of revenue growth have the significant impact on the revenue-expense matching. This highlights the importance of non-operating components in the analysis of revenue-expense matching and the specific mechanism through which the capital structure influences the association between revenue and expense.