자본조달 관련 발행제비용에 관한 실증연구: 회사채 발행 수수료가 주관사 소속 재무분석가 이익예측 특성에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of the underwriter fees on the earnings forecast of the individual financial analyst of the underwriting house in capital raising markets. As shown by the recent dispute of underwriter fees over GS E&C and Korea Ocean Business Corporation, the low rate of issuing bond has been controversial for underwriters. When a firm issues corporate bonds, the issuer intentionally offer lower underwriter fees by inducing competition among underwriting houses, and underwriter houses receive the low-rate fees to increase the issuance performance or to increase long-term ties with the issuing firms. Low fees for underwriters may be advantageous to companies in terms of cost reductions when firm issue bond, but there are other issues arisen. For example, when Lotte Chemical corporate issue bonds in 2015, the firm issue the bonds with the highest interest cost, because the firm failed to promote their bonds due to the low underwriter fees, thus, the firm failed to fill the recruitment amount of bonds. This low underwriter fees are not necessarily a good condition for companies, but more importantly, the low underwriter fees may not be able to resolve the problem of information asymmetry between the issuing firms and external investors. To this end, this study analyze the relationship between capital raising costs and earnings forecasts bias and accuracy of analysts on a sample with forecasting information for individual financial analysts from 2012 to 2017. As a result of the empirical analysis, the underwriter fees (total issuance fee, representative commission fee, and acquisition fee) and analysts’ forecast biases are statistically negative and significant. This suggests that the financial analysts belonging to the issuing companies will disclose the optimistic earnings forecasts as the issuing firm pays more underwriter fees. Additionally, we examine the relationship between the analyst’s forecast accuracy and the underwriter fees. We find that the underwriter fees paid to the individual analysts and the analysts’ forecast accuracy are positively related and significant. In addition, a cluster standard errors regression analysis was conducted to control the characteristics of panel data. Also, we re-regress the model only for the sample belonging to the representative underwriters. As a result, conclusions were consistent with our results of this study. This suggests that the underwriter fees paid to financial analysts may represent a threat to reliable information. Even though financial analysts belonging to the underwriting houses should conduct analysis and monitoring activities on issuing firms as information brokers. This study contributes to the implications of the recent controversial issue of oversupply fees or underpayment fees. In addition, the results of this paper can be used to help understand when calculating the issuing value of bonds and to draw attention to the existing policies of the relevant supervisory authorities by understanding the behavior of the underwriters as an external information certifier in capital raising market. Lastly, this study has different contributions from previous studies on capital markets in that the analysis is focused on the role of underwriter or its fees.