투자자 심리가 수익비용대응에 미치는 영향

This study examines the effect of investor sentiment on revenue-expense matching. In addition, this study investigates the moderating effect of corporate governance structure on the relationship between investor sentiment and revenue-expense matching. Prior studies show that managers have incentives to opportunistically report earnings depending on the degree of investor sentiment. Specifically, during the period of high sentiment, managers have incentives to inflate current earnings to respond to investors’ high expectation. However, during the period of low sentiment, due to high monitoring and vigilance of external stakeholders, managers conservatively report current earnings to reduce possible litigation risks. Based on primarily upon those claims, this study investigates the association between investor sentiment and firms’ accounting policy via revenue-expense matching. Moreover, this study examines whether managers’ opportunistic accounting choice reflected in the relationship between investor sentiment and revenue-expense matching is suppressed by corporate governance structure. To do so, this study implements regression analyses based on Korean companies listed in KOSPI from 2001 to 2020. The number of the final sample is 10,683 firm-year observations. This study measures investor sentiment at the industry level suggested by Conrad et al.(2002) and at the individual firm level suggested by Ryu et al.(2018). Main findings are as follows. First, the contemporaneous matching between revenues and expenses is attenuated while the matching of current revenues with future expenses is increased when investor sentiment is optimistic. Second, when investor sentiment is pessimistic, the contemporaneous matching between revenues and expenses is decreased whereas the matching of current revenues with past expenses is increased. Lastly, the positive relation between current revenues and future expenses under optimistic investor sentiment is restrained by corporate governance structure. These results suggest that managers can make different decisions on accounting policies depending on investor sentiment, and furthermore, their opportunistic accounting decisions can be monitored and prevented by corporate governance. Up to date, research on investor sentiment has been mostly conducted by a financial regime, such as financing, dividends, and capital investment based on behavioral economics. The results of this study are expected to expand the literature in that it provides empirical evidence of the effect of investor sentiment on a firm’s accounting policy, which has been little studied in this area. In addition, it has a contribution to accounting information users in that it provides the caution that they should consider the current status of the capital market in interpreting the disclosed accounting information.