영업권 손상차손 인식의 지연 및 회피를 위한 이익조정에 관한 연구

This study investigates whether managers use earnings management to improve current earnings in order to delay or avoid goodwill impairment recognition under the K-IFRS. To achieve research objective, we first identify firms that postponed goodwill impairment, called suspect firms according to Ramanna and Watts(2012). In particular, suspect firms are classified as all non-impairers with booked goodwill and two consecutive BTM(book-to-market ratio) above one at the end of the fiscal year. second, we measure earnings management by both discretionary accruals and real activities management. We next examine whether the accrual based and real-activity based earnings management are systematically related with the decision to delay or avoid goodwill impairment loss. The analysis by using a sample set of 155 suspect firms and 615 non-suspect matching firms from 2011-2015 yields following key findings. First, the firms suspected to avoid goodwill impairment losses tend to manage their current levels of earnings upward compared to control firms by using accrual as well as real activity. Second, these results are robust to alternative model specifications and several additional test. Third, we find the earnings management to delay or avoid goodwill impairment loss are significantly related with lower future performance. These results suggest that the upward earnings management via discretionary accruals and real transactions could arise from opportunistic motivation that CEOs who postponing goodwill impairment firms are likely to increase their own benefit under the K-IFRS era.