투자규모에 따라 보수적 회계처리가 타인자본비용과 자기자본비용에 미치는 영향

This paper examines whether conservative accounting could reduce cost of capitals in large scale of capital investment. A information asymmetry gets larger when firms increase capital investment, and it influences on the cost of equity and the cost of debt. Conservative accounting could deliver the information about capital investment to the capital provider and reduce cost of capitals, the cost of equity and the cost of debt. We find each cost of equity and the cost of debt rise when firms’ capital investment scales increase. As a result of examining 4,390 KOSPI samples from 2000 to 2010, it is reported that conservative accounting additionally makes both cost of equity and the cost of debt lower when firms have a large scale of investment. Additional analysis reports that firms having low cash should finance more funds from outside and conservative accounting further reduce the cost of equity and the cost of debt in those firms. These results give an opportunity of new understanding about conservatism which is one of the accounting characteristics and give a guideline to future studies. According to FASB and IASB reports, conservatism is not an accounting characteristics anymore in the joint conceptual framework project. But researchers still report the information effect of conservatism after that(LaFond and Watts, 2008; Khan and Watts, 2009) and this paper is in the same line with them. That is, our result documents the effect of conservative accounting on the cost of capitals under large scale of investment. This paper shows that accounting conservatism still does a role as a proxy of accounting quality, because it provides a signal to creditors or mitigates information asymmetry between manager and shareholders. We hope our result can be used as a reference to policy makers of accounting standards and provides an opportunity of new understanding about conservatism to accounting researchers.