경영진단의견서(MD&A)가 재무분석가의 예측특성에 미치는 영향

Financial reporting and disclosure are potentially important means for management to communicate firm performance and governance to outside investors, and firms provide disclosure through regulated financial reports and voluntary communication (Healy and Palepu 1993). Among these overall disclosure packages, management discussion and analysis(MD&A) is particularly important in that MD&A enhances the investor understanding of an issuer's business by providing supplemental analysis and background material to allow further understanding of the nature of the issuer’s operations, and the prospects for the future (Chun et al. 2012). Several academic researchers suggest that the regulators and users of financial reports consider MD&A as particularly important among firm’s total disclosure. However, none of these studies have not investigated an impact of disclosure quality of MD&A on Korean analysts' forecasts characteristics. In this paper, we examine an impact of MD&A quality on information environment of analysts in Korean capital market. To do this, we hypothesize that more number of analyst following, less error and dispersion in analysts’ earnings forecasts are associated with high MD&A quality. To test this hypothesis, MD&A proxies measured by various method are used as test variables. The disclosure quality of MD&A is measured by the degree of compliance with MD&A guidelines of Korean Financial Supervisory Service over firms all listed on Korea Exchange(KRX) from 2010 to 2014. Our dependent variables are the number of analysts following, error, and dispersion of their earnings forecasts. We regress these analysts' forecasts characteristics on MD&A quality controlling for other variables that previous research has shown to be related to analysts’ forecasts. As a result, we find that the highly rated MD&As are associated with more number of analyst following, on the premise that analysts take a role as information intermediaries rather than information providers. This means that analyst’s reports become more valuable and demands for analyst’s service are increased when managers provide a relevant information about firm’s future performance and cash flow. Also, MD&A helps analysts have a less cost of collecting information so that analysts have more incentive to do their job more actively. We also find that high quality of MD&As are positively associated with less dispersion in analysts’ forecasts after controlling for other expected influences on analysts’ forecasts. This implies that MD&A information is relevant for forecasting earnings, and its supplemental analysis and background material allow analysts to provide greater consensus about firm’s future performance. Overall, our results indicate that MD&A disclosure is an important determinant of analyst following and the properties of their forecasts, and provide implications for corporate managers, investors, and regulators of financial reports. To the extent that analysts are professional investment intermediaries who representing or influencing investor beliefs, this study can empower Korean corporate managers have more incentive to disclose sufficient and enhanced information, and also empowers regulators to design, establish, and improving disclosure policies and standards that help investors make better decisions about firm's future performance.