사외이사특성, 기업지배구조 및 감사품질이 퇴직급여부채의 인식유인에 미치는 영향

The selection of retirement pension plan type when introducing retirement pension plan affects the difference in responsibility of employer, employee and complexity of retirement benefit accounting. Specially the actuarial assumptions such as mortality rate, retirement rate and the financial assumptions such as expected return can have a significant impact on the defined benefit liabilities. So this study empirically examined the effect of characteristics of outside director, corporate governance level and audit quality on defined benefit liability. Plan assets to provide benefits to employee is legally separate from the reporting entity. So employer may have a incentive to lower the defined benefit obligation. In this situation, outside director, corporate governance level and audit quality are expected to play an important role in the discretionary judgment of management. So this study empirically examined the effect of characteristics of outside director, corporate governance level and audit quality on defined benefit liability. The sample consists of manufacturing industry firms(1,133 firm-years) with a December fiscal year-end listed on the Korean Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2013. Empirical findings are summarized as follows: the outside directors ratio, foreign ownership and Big4 have significant influence on the increase of defined benefit liability. But the largest shareholder ownership has statistically negative relation with defined benefit liability. These results are robust for sub-sample excluding the defined benefit asset. This research show that outside directors ratio, corporate governance level and audit quality can have an important effect on the defined benefit liability. So these results can provide the importance of transparent corporate governance and audit quality for usefulness and transparency of retirement benefit accounting to the regulators and information users.