기업의 전략적 일탈이 주가붕괴위험에 미치는 영향

Business strategy is a consistent decision-making in which a company creates a competitive advantage within the industry to achieve its goals with limited resources. When firms make decisions about strategies, they tend to follow the strategies of other firms to reduce uncertainties, which is known as strategic conformity. On the other hand, there are companies that choose strategies that deviate from the trend within the industry, and these firms are called strategic deviance firms. These firms have relatively low comparability of earnings information compared to other companies in the industry, causing serious agency problems with information asymmetry between management and investors. Generally, strategic deviance firms are likely to report exceptional gains and losses that deviate from the industry average, and the degree of strategic deviation is reported to be a factor that increases the uncertainty and risk. A large body of prior study has examines the determinant of stock price crash risk. A prominent fact of stock price crash risk is manager’s tendency of withholding bad news. Managers tend to disclose the good news on the capital market in a timely manner, while withholding bad news disclosure, this asymmetric disclosure behavior is a main cause of stock price crash in terms of agency theory. It is widely reported that stock price crash risk is positively related with opacity, increased opacity results in managers withholding firm’s bad news. In addition, stock price crash risk has a positive relationship with excess of perks, career concerns, and tax avoidance. According to prior studies, it also was reported that the greater the degree of strategic deviation, the greater the exceptional profit or loss that is different from the average of the industry. As such, the high downside risk of strategic deviance firms can increase the stock price crash risk, but there is also the possibility of reporting exceptionally high profits. However, although strategic deviance firms are likely to report higher profits, they also have higher uncertainties and risks than strategic conformity firms. Therefore, managers of strategic deviance firms are likely to hide bad news that exists within the firm to support the reasonable reason of their strategic choices. In other words, since it may be difficult for strategic deviance firms to obtain consent from stakeholders, information asymmetry of strategic deviance firms may increase due to the possibility of concealing the firm’s bad news. Therefore, strategic deviance firms are expected to have a greater stock price crash risk. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between strategic deviance and stock price crash risk. Specifically, we examine whether firms with a high degree of strategic deviance have higher stock price crash risk. The sample of this study is 7,925 Korea listed firm-year observations from 2010 to 2018. Empirical findings are summarized as follows. First, we find that firms with strategic deviance have significantly higher stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the results of prior studies. A significant strategic deviation would increase a stock price crash risk as well as an performance uncertainty and agency problem. Second, the relationship between strategic deviance and stock price crash is attenuated when firms have a lot of analyst’s earnings forecast. This result shows that information provision by analysts plays a role in reducing information asymmetry between firms and investors, and that analysts’ earnings forecast has a positive effect on the capital market. To check the robustness of the results, we conduct several sensitivity test such as propensity score matching and the analysis using change variable and dummy variable to control the potential endogneity and the sample bias problems. We find statistically similar results to the main results for these tests. Finally, we examine the relationship between the level of strategic deviation within the high-tech industry and the stock price crash risk, considering the higher information asymmetry between managers and shareholders in high-tech industries, since it is more difficult for investors to understand the information in high-tech industries. As a result, we find that there is a stronger positive (+) relationship between them within the high-tech industry. These findings support by the agency problems in the positive association between strategic deviance and stock price crash risk. This study contributes to the literature by enhancing the understanding of the interaction between information risk and business strategy perceived by capital market.