기업의 사회적 책임과 이익조정

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility activities and earnings management. The Korea Corporate Governance Service evaluates corporate social responsibility activities and announces evaluation grades annually. These evaluation grades show the degree of ethical management of companies, and verify whether companies that have been well-evaluated perform genuine ethical management. Corporate social responsibility activities act as a positive image for external stakeholders such as investors and consumers, thereby contributing to the improvement of the competitiveness of enterprises. For this purpose, a company invests in social responsibility activities regardless of ethics, or invests in social responsibility activities to hide a manager’s earnings management or for low punishment after the exposure of earnings management. Therefore, social responsibility activities, which represent the external ethics of the company, and earnings management, which represents the internal ethics of the company, are judged to be related to each other. For the degree of earnings management, both accrual earnings management and real earnings management were verified. According to the results of the analysis, the higher the ESG rating, the higher the general degree of accrual earnings management and real earnings management. This paper is significant in that it examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility activities and earnings management, which can reflect a manager's ethical consciousness in the modern enterprise environment where the demand for corporate social responsibility is expanding. In addition, this paper implies something about the usefulness of the ESG rating announced by the Korea Corporate Governance Service.