부정적인 ESG 뉴스와 경영자의 자발적 예측 공시

This study examines whether ESG bad news affects the accuracy of management voluntary forecasts. Prior studies mainly focus on stock market reaction to the management voluntary forecasts, this paper extends the determinant of management voluntary forecasts to non-financial ESG news in the media. We select 18 keywords based on indices used in MSCI dataset for the measurement of ESG performance and then search for negative ESG news using the keywords from 2012 to 2019. Using the news and management voluntary forecasts, we find that ESG bad news increases management sales forecasts. This suggests that the negative ESG news calls many stakeholders’ attention and managers voluntarily disclose sales forecasts in order to meet the information demand and to alleviate negative reputation. Moreover, ESG bad news is positively correlated with the optimistic bias of management sales forecasts. This finding indicates that managers tend to seek short-term benefits even at the expense of the potential risk caused by inaccurate forecasts. Finally, the manager who discloses the optimistic sales forecasts appear to manipulates reported earnings using the accrual management to reduce his forecast error even though ESG bad news is negatively correlated with the management sales forecasts errors. The results imply that managers manipulate accrual to meet the level of optimistic forecasts in response to ESG bad news because more significant forecast errors increase the variance of operating performance penalizing the manager later. This study contributes to the literature by showing that the negative ESG news increases the bonding cost leading to welfare loss.