이익투명성이 재무분석가의 정보환경에 미치는 영향: 이익 예측정확성 및 정보활용도를 중심으로

This study examines how earnings transparency affect on analysts’ information environment. Specifically, we investigate whether earnings transparency is associated with earnings forecast accuracy and the precision of analysts’ information sets. Prior studies indicate that earnings attributes are important considerations to analysts. One attribute is earnings transparency; Barth et al.(2013) define earnings transparency as the extent to which earnings reveals an entity's underlying economics. Following Barth et al.(2013), we measure earnings transparency as the extent to which earnings and change in earnings co-vary contemporaneously with returns. Our results show that lower earnings transparency is significantly related to greater forecast error. The extent of forecast error is reduced when a firm is affiliated with a large business group. We further examine whether lower transparency causes the analyst information set to be more unreliable. Additional analysis reveals that low earnings transparency leads to decreased precision of private information, thus lowers the total precision of analysts’ information sets. Our study contributes to understand how the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecasts is affected by earnings attributes. In addition, our results show that the relation between earnings transparency and earnings forecast accuracy is affected by business group affiliation. Overall, our evidence suggests that earnings transparency plays an important role in information environments.