누가 주가붕괴위험을 부담하는가?: 회계이익의 불투명성을 중심으로

Managers withhold bad news up to a certain threshold and sometimes distort accounting information to hide bad news (Dechow et al. 1996, Hutton et al. 2009). The release of accumulated bad news could cause a stock price crash (Jin and Myers 2006, Francis et al. 2011, Kim and Zhang 2015). This paper investigates investors' different trading behavior regarding on the stocks with concealed bad news. The firms that report opaque earnings are less likely to disclose bad news in time. However, the bad news is eventually released and delivered to investors in a different time-line depending on the investors' accessibility to private information. Individual and professional investors have different ability to process information. The professional investors have higher expertise to analyze the information than the individual investors. The individual investors are likely to overlook the implications of the earnings opacity. Thus, the professional investors can sell stocks with opaque earnings, but the individual investors are less likely to timely sell out the stocks having potential bad news. Based on the above discussion, we expect that individual and institutional investors do not have same trading behavior on the stocks with opaque earnings because of the differences in their accessibility to private information and in their skills to interpret signal of bad news. We also conjecture that the professional investors with the information advantage could preempt the bad news and they can sell the stocks stealthily with concealed bad news before the stock price crash happens, while the individual investors are relatively late informed and are likely to lose the opportunity to timely sell the stocks. This paper also examines whether each investors' trading behaviors has been changed since the Fair Disclosure is enacted in 2002. The Fair Disclosure regulation is expected to mitigate the information asymmetry among investor types. This paper measures earnings opacity as the prior three years moving sum of absolute value of discretionary accruals, where discretionary accruals are estimated by the modified Jones model. We proxy for the stock price crash as the event that firm-specific weekly returns fall under 3.2 standard deviations below the mean firm-specific weekly returns for the fiscal year. Empirical analysis is performed for the sample consisting of 5,830 firm-year observations including firms with December fiscal year and firms listed in Korea Exchange for the period 2000~2014 excluding financial crisis period (2008~2009). The results of this study are follows. First, the individual investors are more likely to be net-buyers of the stocks with opaque earnings. It means that although earnings opacity implies the concealed bad news, the individual investors overlook this signal because they do not carefully consider it in their investment strategy. Second, the individual investors are placed in a position to buy the stocks having bad news before the stock price crash but the professional investors actively sell stocks before the crash. This result shows that the professional investors with information advantage preempt bad news before it is fully opened to the market. Third, the individual investors are less likely to buy stocks with opaque earnings concealed bad news after the Fair Disclosure regulation. The gap of the net buying volume before the stock price crash between individual and professional investors has been decreased. It means that the adoption of Fair Disclosure contributes to reducing the information asymmetry among investors. This paper contributes to the literature as follows. First, this study provides an evidence that the individual investors are net-buyers of the stocks with opaque earnings since they have limited accessibility to private information and lack the skills to interpret accounting bad news. Second, this study shows that bad news is delivered to the professional investors preceeding to the individual investors. Therefore, the professional investors who preempt bad news stealthily sell the stocks before the stock price crash, but the individual investors buy them before the crash. Finally, this study revalidates that the adoption of Fair Disclosure has mitigated information asymmetry among investors. All the findings of this study are expected to provide useful information to policy makers as well as individual investors who participate in the market.