법인세비용을 이용한 이익조정이 기업신용등급에 미치는 영향

This study investigates the effect of firms manage earnings by lowering their tax expenses on credit ratings. Recent research provides evidence that the differences between Cash ETR and GAAP ETR (hereafter CGD) reflect firms’ earnings management activities (e.g., Park and Lee 2021). For example, Park and Lee (2021) find that the positive relations between CGD and loss avoidance. Therefore, this study extend these analyses by investigating whether the effect the CGD on corporate credit ratings. This study also examines distinguish between CGD driven by economic fundamentals (innate CGD) versus management choices (discretionary CGD) with respect to credit ratings. To do this, I use credit ratings from KISVALUE database. The sample of this study covers the total 6,920 firm-year observations based on the variable of interest for the period from 2011 to 2019. The empirical results of the study are as follows. First, this paper find that a significantly (at the 0.01 level) negative relations between CGD and credit ratings after controlling for discretionary accruals as well as other variables known to determinants of ratings. The result is consistent with information risk perspective that managers can opportunistically engage in the earnings management through tax expenses that are costly to shareholders and information user of the capital market. Also, such managers are likely to produce low earnings quality. Second, this study also when distinguish between total CGD driven by economic fundamentals (innate CGD) versus management choices (discretionary CGD), I find that both components (innate CGD versus discretionary CGD) have significantly negative effects on credit ratings, respectively. This result implies that credit rating agencies’ response do not have a significant varies with the source of CGD. Third, the negative relation between CGD (innate CGD versus discretionary CGD) and credit ratings becomes still significant when I use CGD (innate CGD versus discretionary CGD) as a indicator variable to measure tax aggressiveness in place of continuous variable. Finally, in additional tests, when I partition the sample into high financial constraints versus low financial constraints, the negative relation between CGD and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with the high financial constraints. In sum, these results suggest that firms manage earnings by lowering their tax expenses are associated with lower credit ratings. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on earnings management and credit ratings by establishing a link between firms’ earnings management through tax expenses strategies and credit rating. In addition to providing the first empirical examination of the factors that connect CGD to corporate credit rating. Specifically, the findings of this paper show novel evidence that the capital market consequences (e.g., credit rating agencies) of earnings management through tax expenses is related to CGD as the measure of information risk. Such a CGD is a credible indicator for lower earnings quality. Thus, the findings of this study will be of interest to shareholders and regulatory authorities as well.