기업외부환경이 제조기업의 비대칭적 원가행태에 미치는 영향 - 산업집중도 및 시장상황을 중심으로

This paper focuses on the relation between the cost stickiness and the macroeconomic environment a company faces. To be concrete, we examine the effect of the market competition and industry condition on the cost behavior of a company. Prior researches show that the costs change is less sensitive to sales change when sales decrease than when sales increase. This "asymmetric reaction of cost" comes from the manager's decision that tends to maintain the level of cost factors such as labors and production facilities in spite of the sales reduction. Therefore, the degree of the asymmetric reaction will change according to the macroeconomic factors which influence the manager's decision making process. In this sense, we consider the market competition and the industry condition as the macroeconomic factors. Practically, we expect the cost stickiness increases under the harder market competition and a favorable industry condition. In addition, we expect cost stickiness incrementally increases when a company is under both harder market competition and favorable industry condition. Using the 104,654 firm-year data from 1980 to 2010, we find the cost stickiness varies based on the market competition and industry condition as we expect. This result implies that managers incorporate the macroeconomic environments in deciding the cost strategy. The contribution of this research is that it extends the cost stickiness researches to the macroeconomic area.