CSR 활동 유형에 따른 이익조정 동기의 차별성

With the growing concerns on sustainable growth of corporate, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has recently emerged as an important dimension of accounting research. In 2006, Federation of Accountants also defined CSR as any kinds of social activities by which the firms are favored in terms of sustainability. Thus, CSR in accounting research implies that related activities or outcomes of financial accounting may enhance the sustainability of the firms, especially through more reliable financial information. Most previous studies on Korean listed firms present that the firms with aggressive CSR activities produce more reliable accounting information. Previous studies drew the distinction between strategic CSR and defensive CSR depending on those motivations. Defensive CSR engaged in defensively responsible activities that benefit for stake-holders and firm values. Strategic CSR, otherwise, is more aggressive and preemptive in decision-making and the decisions are focused on its customers and economic performance. Prior researches on CSR provide alternative perspectives which are pursuit of social obligations as stake-holder theory and of manager’s self interest as agency theory. From these perspectives, unlike fundamental purpose of CSR, a manager has incentives to conduct differential CSR activities for reputational reasons or concealing their corporate misconduct. Despite of demands for research on CSR from diverse aspects, relatively few domestic studies have been devoted to the differential effects of those two CSR activities on accounting information. This study thus attempts to offer further evidence of the differential relationships of CSR on accounting transparencies. Samples are 874 firm-year observations(859 for post-revision period of KEJI CSR indexes) of Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) listed firms whose KEJI CSR indexes are available from Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice Institute. There are various CSR indexes and some of those are recently developed in Korea. KEJI CSR index is one of a reliable measurement for CSR which is widely used in previous CSR studies and is based on the financial numbers. We manipulate the strategic CSR and the defensive CSR using seven KEJI CSR indexes depending on their motivations, and proxy earnings management as discretionary accruals. We conduct several empirical tests and the results are consistent with agency theory perspective developed on the CSR research. First, firms with higher strategic CSR activities engage in aggressive earnings management. On the other hand, firms with higher defensive CSR activities shows insignificant results. Results indicate that differentiated incentives for earnings management depend on the types of CSR activities. Defensive CSR is engaged in relatively long-term and stake-holder value add decisions. Strategic CSR activities, however, are mostly related to the short-term and discretionary decisions for firm’s economic performance and these costly decisions lead incentives to earnings management on the basis of manager’s discretion. Second, we test the differential effects of two CSR activities on Korean chaebol firms. Consistent with the results for all the listed firms, there exist additional positive correlations between strategic CSR activities and earnings management. Chaebol is generally exemplified as a poor governance mechanism with the wedge between voting and cash flow right, the discretion from the mechanism facilitate the owners to cover up the strategically incurred expenses. Third, we additionally conducted empirical tests to investigate the influence on real activity manipulations as an earnings management and strategic CSR activities are related to the real activity manipulations based on abnormal production cost and abnormal discretionary expense. Fourth, for the samples over 5years from 2011, despite the KEJI indexes components partially revised, the test results are consistent with the pre-revised period tests. This paper provides significant evidence on differential CSR effectiveness on corporate decision- making and financial accounting information. We propose theoretical implication that the differential motivations of CSR are cautiously divided in future research designs. Furthermore, regulation authorities or evaluation intermediaries as financial analysts also take those differential aspects of CSR in their practical implementations.