회계-세법의 일치성이 회계이익의 지속성 및 미래현금흐름과의 관련성에 미치는 영향

There were controversies for and against the book-tax conformity(BTC) in the United States, according to which enhancing BTC can increase or decrease the quality of earnings. Therefore, there have been studies on whether BTC enhancement is positive or negative for the quality of earnings. Atwood et al.(2010), Blaylock et.al. (2015) and Koo(2013) have improved the methodology of previous studies. However, they have a limitation by assuming that the BTCs are the same for all companies in the same country. And their empirical results could be affected by the inter-country differences in accounting environments. To improve these methodological limitations, this study restricts the samples to Korean firms and measures each firm’s BTC respectively, and then, performs regression analysis on whether earnings’ persistence and association with future cash flows are different by the BTC level. This study also obtains another evidence through additional tests not requiring BTC measures. Test results support the research hypotheses by showing that the earnings’ persistence and association with future cash flows are lower for the firms with higher BTC. Additional test results also reinforce the validity of research hypotheses. This study makes an academic contribution by improving the methodologies of existing studies, and suggesting that the higher BTC makes the quality of earnings lower. In addition, the results of this study imply that arguments against the BTC are more convincing, and therefore, aligning accounting standards and tax laws needs to be done carefully and limitedly so that the usefulness of accounting information is not infringed upon.