경영자의 과신성향과 주가정보성: 미래이익반응계수와 주가동조성을 중심으로

Most of prior studies on management overconfidence have reported that overconfident managers have negative impacts on the firm. However, there are some studies claiming that there is no evidence that overconfident managers undermine corporate value, instead, they achieve innovative success by boldly investing in innovation. This paper plans to examine the effect of overconfident management on the firm information environment and try to find out the benefits of overconfident management. Prior studies have reported two opposite directions on the effect of overconfident management on the corporate information environment. Overconfident managers may distort financial reporting and/or conservative accounting tends to weaken if earnings forecast becomes difficult to achieve or investment returns fall short of expectations. But there are studies which claimed that overconfident management can improve the information environment; these managers are more inclined to voluntarily disclose and provide specific earnings forecast. Kramer and Liao (2016), who carried out direct studies on the association between overconfident management and financial analysts' forecast properties, reported that financial analysts' earnings forecast accuracy is higher and forecast dispersion is smaller in overconfident management companies. Wei and Zhang (2016) analyzed the information role of overconfident managers in terms of mitigating information asymmetry among investors and found that financial analysts' earnings forecast dispersion is small, broader investor base is formed and information asymmetry between investors is mitigated. This paper plans to empirically examine the informational role of overconfident managers in terms of stock price informativeness. Stock price informativeness is often measured as a future earnings response coefficient(FERC) or stock price synchronicity. If overconfident magement weakens information disclosure, for example, distorting or obscuring the financial information too much, then investors may not have enough information to predict the firm's future prospects and place a little weight on the corporate information in forming a future profit expectation. In this case, it is expected that overconfident management have relatively high stock price synchronicity level and low FERC. On the other hand, overconfident management have strong willingness to disclose voluntarily, conduct the accounting with which the investors are able to easily evaluate future prospects and send a signal to the market that they are firmly carrying out long-term investment projects to make the investors collect more firm-specific information. In this case, there exists a possibility that stock price informativeness will be improved. This paper empirically analyzed the effect of management's overconfidence on FERC and stock price synchronicity of the non-financial companies listed on KOSPI and KOSDAQ market between 2004 and 2015. This paper used the measurement of overconfident management of Schrand and Zechman (2012). FERC was estimated using a standard model used in the field of accounting, and the stock price synchronicity was measured relying on Piotroski and Roulstone (2004). For the robustness of the results, double clustering at the company and year level and control of the company fixing effect were conducted to estimate the standard error of the regression coefficient. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the companies with overconfident management have an incremental increase in FERC and a lower stock price synchronicity. This implies that the more overconfident management is, the more likely to use value-relevant firm-specific information in the market. This study contributes in the following aspects. First, it shows that the effect of overconfident management in the information environment could be a benefit to the company. Second, they have tried to explain the relationship between the stock price and earnings in the accounting field and FERC is suggested as a factor to improve the explanatory power of this relationship. Studies that identified cross-sectional determinants of FERC have focused mainly on the economic characteristics of companies, such as size and growth. However, this study is considered to contribute to the research field of FERC as well as the research field that claims that the characteristics of manager give effects on the corporate information environment by presenting an evidence that the overconfident management also can be an important determinant of the firm information environment.