재무제표의 비교가능성과 기업의 위험추구12

This study examines whether financial statement comparability is related to the corporate risk-taking. Although the investment decision associated with corporate risk-taking is one of the core management activities, there are few studies which investigate the corporate risk-taking behavior in accounting area. Focusing on comparability, one of the qualitative properties of accounting information, this study examines whether the financial statement comparability affects the corporate risk-taking behavior. If a company’s financial statement can be easily compared with other companies’ financial statements, information asymmetry between managers and external information users can be reduced, and it can intensify monitoring and supervision of the management’s investment activities. As a result, it is expected that excessive corporate risk-taking will be reduced by suppressing manager’s opportunistic investments, such as constructing trenches to expand the manager’s influence, unnecessary investments for empire building, and myopic investments to obtain short-term results. In contrast, if the comparability is high, it is also possible that shareholders who can maximize their wealth through risk-taking exert investment pressure on the managers to actively take risks. Using 8,657 firm-years of domestic listing companies from 2008 to 2015, we find a negative association between financial statement comparability and corporate risk-taking, and this negative association is more pronounced in the firms with greater information asymmetry. Also, when the comparability is high, the degree to which R&D expenses increase future earnings volatility also decreases. These results have academic contributions in that they inform that the comparability affects corporate investment activities and can be a determinant of corporate risk-taking.