최고경영자 교체 유형이 재무제표의 비교가능성에 미치는 영향 : 최고경영자의 경력에 대한 고민을 중심으로

This paper investigates whether managers’ career concerns affect financial statement comparability. Career concerns mean a manager’s concerns about the impact of current performance on contemporaneous and future compensation. The CEO's ability is assessed by the performance measures such as earnings and stock prices. Career concerns arise when employers use the managers' current performance to assess ability and set compensation. Therefore the managers are interested in earnings and stock prices that may affect their career (Fama 1980). Prior studies show that managers tend to delay the release of bad news rather than good news or manage earnings to favorably influence the market's assessment of their ability and reduce career concerns. This research extends the arguments of these prior studies to conduct an empirical analysis of whether manager's career concerns reduce the financial statement comparability. This paper examines whether career concerns are negatively related to financial statement comparability, focusing on CEO turnover. CEO turnover is chosen because the CEO turnover is found to occur when the tendency to manage earnings downward is clearly observed due to career concerns in the previous studies. Prior studies find evidence that newly appointed CEOs tend to take an earnings bath in their first year to lower the benchmark for future earnings and start anew. Therefore, such a downward adjustment is likely to affect the quality of financial statement, thereby reducing the comparability. In addition, a new manager may have a more advantageous position in assessing future performance evaluation by lowering the financial statement comparability at the time of turnover. In other words, it is possible for the new manager to directly manage accounting performance that affects his/her future compensation, reputation and career through means such as earnings management or selling unnecessary assets, as well as to eliminate the assessment elements that may be disadvantageous to him(her) in advance by appropriately adjusting the comparability. If the financial statement comparability is low, it is difficult to compare the performance of other managers in the same industry with that of their own. Thus, by reducing comparability, managers can proactively eliminate any disadvantages resulting from its future performance or relative assessment. This study analyzes the relationship between CEO turnover and financial statement comparability for the listed companies from 2007 to 2015. We examine whether the financial statements comparability decreases as CEO is replaced, and further investigate whether there is a difference in the comparability depending on the characteristics of the CEO. Specifically, we examine how the characteristics of CEOs, such as either internal promotion or external search, forced replacement or voluntary replacement, ages, affect the financial statements comparability.