배당정책이 회계정보의 보수성에 미치는 영향: 외국인지분율의 역할을 중심으로

This paper investigates what effects the company’s dividend has on the conservatism of accounting information. Previous studies mentioned that dividend and conservatism reduced the information asymmetry and agency cost, but did not report the relationship between the dividend and conservatism. It is also necessary to examine whether foreign investors play a role of monitoring and monitering in the impact of dividends on conservatism. Therefore this paper focuses on the relationship between the dividend and conservatism and its impact on the proportion of foreign investor. In order to verify this, this study analyzed 14,592 companies listed on Korea Exchange from 2002 to 2015. The main result of the study is as follows. First, as the dividend payout, dividend tendency, dividend payout increment proportion increased, the conservatism decreased. This showed that there is a signalling effect and reduction in agency cost and this resulted in reduction of companies’ shareholder’s concern on manager’s opportunistic actions, monitoring level which allowed reduction of demand for conservative accounting practice. This empirical result suggests that the dividend signaling effect and the agency cost are reduced so that the shareholders of the corporation do not force conservative accounting for the accounting selection because it reduces the concern about the manager's opportunistic behavior and lowers the level of surveillance do. Second, the relationship between the dividend payout, dividend tendency, dividend increment proportion and conservatism was found to be negative when the dividend and foreign investment increased simultaneously. It suggests that foreign investors increase the conservativeness of lowered accounting information due to the signal effect of dividends. In other words, this suggests that foreign investors perform their roles in the sense that they check the additional leaks of companies from the perspective of corporate stakeholders excluding shareholders. From the point of view of stake-holders in order to contain the company’s wealth flow out, the foreign investment proportion has carrying out well on corporate governance. This result indicates that the foreign investment plays an effective role for external monitoring system and it strengthens the conservatism. This study is meaningful in that it is the first study to analyze the relationship between dividend and conservatism. It also contributes to the result of empirical analysis that enhances the conservativeness of accounting information by performing additional monitoring and monitering function of foreign ownership have. As the effects of dividends on the conservatism, we propose further topics as the topic of whether corporate stakeholders such as managers and outside directors further influence the negative (-) relationship between dividends and conservatism.