회계 보수성이 대리인 문제와 발생액 이상현상에 미치는 영향

This paper investigates the accrual anomaly and the role of accounting conservatism. The accrual anomaly is a phenomenon that investors overprice the persistence of accruals while they underprice the persistence of cash flows, leading to significant stock mispricing. Sloan(1996) indicates that stock prices act as if investors "fixate" on earnings, failing to fully distinguish between the different properties of the accrual and cash flow components of earnings. However, Kothari et al.(2006) suggest that, under the agency theory of overvalued equity, managers of overvalued firms are likely to manage their firms' accruals upwards to prolong the overvaluation. Thus, high-accrual stocks are likely to be over-represented with overvalued firms. Overvaluation, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely and this could be a essential factor for the accrual anomaly. We examine accounting conservatism, which is related to earnings persistence and agency costs. Conservatism reduces agency costs, but it reduces earnings persistence by distorting revenue-expense matching. If the accrual anomaly is caused by the agency problem according to overvaluation, conservatism would mitigate the accrual anomaly because conservatism help firms reduce the agency problems. On the contrary, if the anomaly occurs due to the functional fixation, conservatism would exacerbate the accrual anomaly since conservatism reduces the earnings persistence. We find that the accrual anomaly in less conservative groups is larger than that in the most conservative groups. In addition, overvalued group shows severer accrual anomaly than other firms, but conservatism mitigates the anomaly of the overvalued group. These results are confirmed with the additional return regression tests where the other risk factors are controlled. Overall, this paper provides evidence that agency problem linked to overvaluation causes, in part, the accrual anomaly and conservatism helps to reduce agency problems in the capital market.