경영자 지분율과 재무제표 비교가능성 간 관련성

This study examines the relation between managerial ownership and financial statement comparability. Since market participants analyze and evaluate firms based on the financial statements, comparable financial statements could alleviate information asymmetry. However, the higher the agency cost of the firm, the more likely the manager is to report low quality of accounting information to pursue private interests, so that it could affect financial statement comparability. We examine whether managerial ownership plays an important role in determining financial statement comparability. Managerial ownership is calculated using the sum of the number of owned shares that can be inquired in the “executives’ history and status of owned shares” in the TS2000 database of the Korea Listed Companies Association. Executives include the CEO, executive directors, managing directors, internal auditors, and advisors, etc. And financial statement comparability is estimated using the method as in De Franco et al. (2011). Using 10,755 observations of KOSPI and KOSDAQ listed firms for the period 2011 to 2019, we find that higher managerial ownership is associated with greater financial statement comparability. We also provide evidence that positive association between CEO’s ownership and financial statement comparability. These results suggest that firms with high managerial ownership experience low level of agency problem and report more comparable financial statement. Also, these results can be interpreted as the manager’s ownership increases, the interests of shareholders and managers coincide, and it is expected that the manager would make decisions in the direction of maximizing the interests of shareholders as in Jensen and Meckling (1976). We also examine several additional analyses. A significant positive relationship between managerial ownership and financial statement comparability is still remained when we use the method of Francis et al. (2014) to measure financial statement comparability. And in order to alleviate concerns about the possibility that the results of this paper may be caused by endogeneity, we use the first difference model and the time analysis model and results from both models show a significant positive relationship between managerial ownership and financial statement comparability. This study makes several c ontributions as follows. First, this study extends the literature by examining the association between managerial ownership and financial statement comparability. Second, our findings provide political implications for firms with low managerial ownership to enhance financial statement comparability. In particular, regulators may require appropriate internal control and monitoring through the board of directors and committees within the board of directors to prevent financial reporting behavior pursuing the private interests of the firm’s managers.