감독당국의 지침과 공시 모범사례가 이익품질과 정보비대칭에 미치는 영향 : 제약·바이오 기업을 대상으로

This study analyzes the effects of supervisory guidelines and best practices for disclosure for the purpose of protecting investors issued by supervisory authority on accounting quality and information asymmetry. As stock prices rose sharply and volatility increased in the pharmaceutical and bio industry in 2018, the Financial Supervisory Service and the Financial Services Commission(hereafter referred to as the supervisory authority) wanted to eliminate accounting uncertainty and improve accounting transparency to protect investors through the supervisory guidelines for R&D expenses in the industry. In addition, supervisory authority announced guidance of best practices for disclosure of R&D activities to expand disclosure. This study examines whether the accounting quality has improved after the supervisory authorities' guidelines for the accounting of R&D expenses in pharmaceutical and bio industry companies from 2015 to 2019. In addition, we compare and analyze information asymmetry between investors of companies that have been disclosed applying the best practice disclosure by the supervisory authority and those that have not. In this study, the accounting quality was measured in four ways: the absolute value of discretionary accruals measured with the modified Jones model and the PMDA model, and the absolute value of the residuals of the DD model and the FLOS model. Information asymmetry was measured four ways: the standard deviation of individual stock returns, the standard deviation of the excess returns compared to the market index and industry index measured by the market-adjusted model, and stock transaction turnover which is trading volume of individual company stocks divided by the number of issued shares. The empirical analysis results of this study are summarized as follows. First, most of the variables indicating before and after the supervisory authority's guidelines for R&D expenditure accounting and the variables of the accounting quality proxy showed a significant negative(-) relationship. This means that, contrary to what the supervisory authority intended, the accounting quality of the pharmaceutical and bio industry has been lowered after the supervisory guidelines. Ignoring individual companies' drug development success rate and types of new drugs, presenting and enforcing guidelines for the standardization of comprehensive R&D expenses by focusing on these guidelines during the review and supervision process appear to be lowering the accounting quality in the pharmaceutical and bio industry. It is considered as one piece of evidence that can undermine the application of substantive accounting for each individual company's situation, which is one of the biggest advantages under IFRS, the expansion of the accounting practice guidelines or supervisory guidelines should be approached with caution. Second, there was no significant relationship between the variables representing before and after the application of the best practice disclosure by the supervisory authority and the information asymmetry proxy variables. This means that the supervisory authority's presentation of best practices for disclosure and applying it to disclosure do not affect the information asymmetry among investors of the pharmaceutical and bio companies. This could be because of the decline in information value due to the setting of a disclosure format that does not take into account the characteristics and circumstances of individual companies, the possibility that the disclosure of information according to best practices would not be treated as an important variable by market participants when trading stocks. Also, value of disclosure according to the best practice could be insignificant as information already known to the market through IR and the media. It is difficult to derive the effect of reducing information asymmetry between investors because the timeliness is quite low to disclose the information in the business report that is regularly disclosed. Therefore, it could be more appropriate to reduce information asymmetry among investors by producing timely information through the expansion of timely disclosure rather than setting a disclosure format and disclosing it on the periodic disclosure. This study is significant in that it can be used as a reference for future supervisory guidance by empirically analyzing whether the guidance of the supervisory authority and the presentation of best practices for disclosure has a significant effect on accounting quality and information asymmetry. However, there is a limitation in that it could not be ascertained whether the fact that the supervisory authority's disclosure of best practices for disclosure did not have a significant effect on information asymmetry was due to the decrease in information effect according to the disclosure format or the disclosure of information without timeliness.