이연법인세 정보가 기업신용등급에 미치는 영향― 비상장기업의 실증적 증거 ―

This paper investigate whether the relation between deferred tax expenses and credit ratings. Specifically, this study analyzes the effects of deferred tax expenses (i.e., temporary book-tax differences) on corporate credit ratings in a non-listed firms setting. A credit rating implications include signaling, maintaining relationships with third parties such as suppliers and customers, and maintaining firms’ credit ratings in line with competitors. A credit rating represents a signal of overall quality in the capital market. So, rating agencies may face fewer incentives to detect earnings management by issuers. Prior research suggests that differences between book-tax differences (BTD) or temporary book-tax differences (DTE) reflect firms’ underlying economic fundamentals and their earnings management activities (e.g., Phillips et al., 2003；Jeon and Park, 2002 etc). For example, Phillips et al. (2003) argue that managers typically have more discretion in financial reporting than in tax reporting and can exploit such discretion to manage income upwards in ways that do not affect current taxable income. Such earnings management will generate book-tax differences that increase a firm’s net deferred tax liability (i.e., deferred tax liabilities [or defined as the change in deferred tax liabilities] minus net deferred tax assets [the change in deferred tax assets]；DTE) and, consequently, increase its DTE. Thus, the prior literature on temporary book-tax differences (DTE) provides evidence consistent with the differences providing information about earnings quality(Hanlon, 2005). But, most studies related to the effect of BTD (or DTE) on credit ratings focus on listed companies and test a relationship between BTD (or DTE) and credit ratings. However, a portion of non-listed companies has increased over time and many policies on funding are provided for them. Given the importance of non-listed companies in economic market and different characteristics of reported earnings, it is somewhat surprising that there is a little study that investigate a relationship between DTE and credit ratings using non-listed companies. This study try to fill the gap. Therefore, this study use the level in DTE and change in DTE, a publicly available measure, as their empirical surrogate for temporary book-tax differences (e.g., Phillips et al., 2003；Park, 2013). To do this, this study use credit ratings from KISVALUE. Initially, 1 point represents firms with the best credit rank and 10 point represents firms with the worst credit rank. However, for the purpose of interpretation, This paper remark credit rank oppositely. That is, 1 point represents firms with the worst credit rank and 10 point represents firms with the best credit rank. The sample is non-listed firms which are not listed in security market. This paper uses the total 12,928 firm-year observations for the period from 2000 to 2007. The empirical test results are as follows. First, in the non-listed firms’ sample tests, I do find significantly negative relation between deferred tax expenses (the level in DTE) and credit ratings, after controlling for other variables and discretionary accruals that affect the level of credit ratings. The above results are mostly observed with the level in DTE, but not with the change in DTE. In this case, credit analysts may interpret the high DTE (i.e. where book income is more than taxable income) as a signal of decreased earnings quality, which results in less favorable credit ratings. Second, when I partition full sample into sub-samples based on audit quality (Big 4 auditors vs non-Big 4 auditors), only the negative relation between DTE and credit ratings are more noticeable for firms audited by Big 4 auditors. The findings of this study have contributions in that they suggest the negative relation between DTE and credit ratings may be affected by measures of temporary BTD (level in DTE vs change in DTE) and audit quality (Big 4 auditors vs non-Big 4 auditors), while previous studies focus on investigating the relation between two variables on average. Above empirical results of this study are expected to make additional contribution to studies on the BTD (or DTE) as a new evidence. Therefore, understanding the credit ratings consequences of DTE is important and interesting in its own merit. Also, these findings are very useful and provide a lot of important implications to academicians as well as practitioners, creditors, accounting standard setters, and regulators that are interested in earnings quality and audit quality in non-listed companies.