기업수명주기 측정기준 비교 연구

[Purpose] Corporate life cycle has received considerable interest in the accounting research. Although the concepts are fancy, estimating firm life cycle stages is a complicated exercise. So, it is very important to find reasonable proxy for company life cycle. Anthony and Ramesh(1992) classify firms into five life cycle stages using ranking procedures. While Dickinson(2011) gives parsimonious life cycle measure which comes from the combination of cash flows patterns. We think there could be some different classification results because of different approaches. This study tries to verify the conformity and compare the information contents of two life cycle measures. [Methodology] First, our study calculates the conformity ratio of the life cycle stages from two models suggested by Anthony and Ramesh(1992) and Dickinson(2011). We make matrix table for this analysis. Second, this paper adapts the model of Fairfield and Yorn(2001) to test the incremental effects of life cycle stage in 1 year head change in ROA. [Findings] We find that there is a great discrepancy between the results of two life cycle measures. The correct classification ratio is just 37.81%. And we also find that the life cycle measure of Dickinson(2011) is a robust classification for firm life cycle and is effective in explaining both the magnitude and persistence of future profitability relative to that of Anthony and Ramesh(1992). [Implications] This is the very first paper which tries to verify the conformity of life cycle measures. Our findings will shed the new lights on the field of life cycle studies. Future researches should attempt to overcome the aforementioned limitations.