기업지배구조와 회계 : 연구동향과 미래 제언

Over the past three decades, the corporate governance literature in accounting and auditing has grown rapidly. To better understand this body of work, we discuss the literature review and summarize selected results (i.e., clusters of papers with new and interesting results) from recent empirical research papers. Many recent studies deepen our understanding of the link between corporate governance characteristics and accounting outcomes, such as fraudulent financial reporting, restatements, earnings management/accruals quality, and accounting conservatism. Specially, the studies provide deeper, more current insights into the relation between governance characteristics and fraudulent financial reporting. Overall, these studies continue to find governance quality and fraud to be negatively related, but there are questions about the magnitude of the effects. Recent studies reinforce the notion that companies with stronger governance are more likely to select and retain high-quality external auditors. Finally, research also has addressed the role of audit committee quality in shareholder ratification of the auditor, once the audit committee has selected the auditor. This study has following purposes. First, we need to incorporate multiple actors in firms’ governance into the analyses, as most studies associate governance variables with accounting/auditing variables, but paid little or no attention to multiple actors. Second, we need to address governance processes (what boards and audit committees actually do and how they do it), not just governance characteristics such as independence or financial expertise. Thirds, we need to further examine on the relation between corporate governance and accounting/auditing in other theory than agency theory, such as stewardship theory, stakeholder theory, resource dependence theory, institutional theory, managerial hegemony theory that do not follow agency theory in governance model. Fourth, as the examination of governance characteristics deepens, we need to develop better measures of board and audit committee characteristics, and need to explore interactions among governance characteristics, as opposed to simply the effect of each individual characteristic. Fifth, we need to be much more careful in dealing with endogeneity in governance research, as governance characteristics and outcomes of interest(accounting, auditing, and internal control) may be affected by some of the same variables. We believe that the findings to date have a number of important implications for practice. First, the weight of evidence suggests that weak governance is associated with an increased likelihood of adverse financial reporting outcomes(in particular, fraud and restatements). Thus, perhaps the most fundamental practice implication is that the governance research findings to date are, on an overall basis, consistent with the focus on improved corporate governance(e.g., board independence and audit committee expertise) founded through SOX and related regulatory reforms. That is, the governance reforms in SOX have empirical support and are not simply unsupported reactions to a crisis. Second, since the board and the audit committee are primary mechanisms for the internal monitoring of top management’s financial reporting behavior, external auditors need to very carefully examine corporate governance characteristics and processes in assessing the control environment. Third, many research indicates that external auditors assess risk higher and plan more audit hours for firms with weak governance. However, whether auditors adequately adjust for weak governance has not been examined. Figure 1 presents our organization framework for reviewing firms’ governance and accounting literature in Korea.