원가행태의 하방경직성과 재량적 매출발생액

Prior studies find that costs rise more with increases in activity volume than they fall with decreases and label this asymmetric cost behavior as sticky cost(Anderson et al. 2003). Many factors influence the extent of cost stickiness: current sales change; prior period resource levels; expected future sales; agency and behavioral factors. This study focuses on part of cost stickiness that is attributable to agency problems and investigates the association between this type of cost stickiness and managerial opportunism. To the extent that cost stickiness arises directly from optimal managerial behavior with adjustment costs rather than from managers’ deliberate resource commitment decisions in the presence of adjustment costs, costs to sales ratios likely increase. In turn, managers may attempt to conceal the inefficiency by managing earnings through discretionary revenues. Relying on this intuition, this study hypothesizes that cost stickiness results in discretionary revenues. Specifically, based on Chen et al.’s(2012) evidence that cost stickiness of firms where free cash flow is high, the number of outside directors divided by the total number of directors is low, or the number of shares held by institutional investors divided by the total shares outstanding is driven by the agency problem, this study investigates whether cost stickiness of these firms leads to discretionary revenue. Consistent with the hypothesis, this study finds that cost stickiness driven by the agency problem is positively associated with discretionary revenue. This association is observed only in the subsample where current sales level before increasing sales through discretionary revenue is lower than prior sales level, suggesting that a decrease in demand encourages the managerial opportunism. In addition, the evidence shows that cost stickiness driven by the agency problem is positively associated with costs to sales ratios. This supports the interpretation that the mechanism underlying the association between the cost stickiness and discretionary revenues is the inefficiency associated with resource commitment decisions. This study advances the literature on the effects of cost stickiness. There is much evidence on the causes of cost stickiness(e.g., Anderson et al. 2003; Kama and Weiss 2013; Banker and Byzalov 2013). However, the understanding is far from complete regarding how cost stickiness affects the information environment. The findings of this study suggest that cost stickiness negatively affects the information environment. When costs behave asymmetrically, it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons of time-series and cross-sectional cost information, and as a result investors may not discern whether costs are properly reported. In addition, more importantly, the evidence of this study shows that cost stickiness driven by the agency problem leads to managerial opportunistic incentives to inflate sales.