여성임원이 이익의 질에 미치는 영향

This study examined whether female executives on the board enhance a firm’s accounting quality. As more and more countries have accepted the gender quota system on not only the public sector but also the private areas, there has been a growing interest in the effectiveness of female executives. Moreover, as the Korean legislative body is currently proposing a law that requires to employ female executives more than a specific portion for certain companies with total assets of 2 trillion or more, the necessity is increased to confirm the effect of female executives on corporate characteristics in the Korean setting. Studies on western countries have accumulated test results of the influence of gender on the companies’ various features; however, data inability has significantly limited Korean studies. We used executive data on the annual report that required to disclose gender information. As this regulation was in effect since the annual report of 2014, we used a comprehensive sample of 2,974 non-financial firm-year data listed on the Korea Stock Exchange from 2014 to 2017. We tested the effect of female executives on the firm’s earnings management, accrual quality, and earnings persistence. To test earnings management, we used Kothari et al. (2005)’s matching model and Roychowdhury (2006)’s real earnings management model to measure a firm’s earnings management. For earnings quality, we employed the modified Dechow and Dichev (2002) model by McNichols (2002). Our earnings persistence was based on the Sloan (1996) model. We included various firm-related characteristics including firm size, operating cash flow, return on asset, and other characteristics including industry and year effects in our model to control other effects on the dependent variables. Our empirical findings showed that the existence of female executives in the board decreased manager's earnings management, increased accrual quality, and enhanced earnings persistence. Further tests to control data limitation showed consistent results. We construct the paired matching sample (1:1 or 1:2) to overcome the unbalanced data structure in which only 229 firm-years were related to women directors among the total 2,974 firm-years. Test results on the matched sample showed identical results as the main tests. We believe that our test results provide sufficient research implication on the issues related to the employment of women in Korean companies. Korean companies have allowed relatively limited numbers of female executives; however, our test results showed that accepting women on board enhanced accounting quality, which implies the possibility that the role of the female director in the decision making may benefit the companies in certain ways. Our findings may provide important implications for the recently discussed regulatory issue such as the quota system for the board gender diversity. Moreover, our tests showed that gender could influence reporting quality, which is a promising result for the regulator who concerns the lower quality of accounting information than western markets. The limitation of this study is as follows. As accounting quality is the result of various company characteristics, care must be taken to interpret the effects of the presence of female executives. Although we controlled various factors that may influence accounting quality, there are certain limitations to interpreting the results as causality.