재무제표의 비교가능성과 상대적 성과평가

This study examines the association between financial statement comparability and managerial compensation in a perspective of relative performance evaluation (hereafter RPE). Prior literature argues that managerial compensation using the RPE is beneficial to both agents (e.g., managers) and principals (e.g., shareholders) because it insulates agents from common shocks and provides shareholders with a useful measure to identify agents’ efforts (Holmstrom 1982). Despite of theoretical arguments above, the empirical research on the RPE provides the mixed evidence on whether firms use the relative performance evaluation when they determine the managerial compensation. Because researchers can not explicitly identify peer firms, many studies have investigated the economic characteristics, such as industry, firm siz and, growth opportunity, which can capture the common shocks in agents’ performance (Joh 1999; Garvey and Milbourn 2003; Albuquerque 2009; Gopanlan et al. 2010). Although, in the US, recent amended disclosure rules require firms to disclose their peer-firms which are used in performance evaluation, it is still difficult to identify whether Korean firms use the RPE in their managerial compensation because there are no rules for peer-firms disclosure in Korea. Thus we attempt to examine whether Korean firms use financial statement comparability to control common shocks in their managers’ performance evaluation. We focus on the financial statement comparability (hereafter comparability) which is termed as a similar mapping from economic events to financial statements among firms (De Franco et al. 2011). Given that the comparability is affected by each firms’ accounting policy, if a firm has higher comparability with certain firms, it indicates that accounting policy or practice between those firms are similar. Accordingly, it is possible that accounting information generated through similar accounting process has common factors between those firms. In addition, there is more useful information available to identify common factors between firms when those firms are highly comparable (De Franco et al. 2011). Based on arguments above, we expect firms to use the RPE based on the comparability because corporate environment with higher comparability makes firms control common shocks easier.