물적분할이 재무분석가 이익예측정확성에 미치는 영향: 한국 물적분할 사례를 중심으로

In this paper, we examine the impact of corporate vertical spin-off on the analysts’ information environment for consolidated financial statements. Corporate vertical spin-off is expected to enhance the information environment for analysts by providing additional information about the newly established company after the event. This paper employs four measures – the number of analysts following a firm, absolute earnings forecast errors, earnings forecast bias, and forecast dispersion – to capture the analysts’ information environment for a firm. The sample includes 9,756 firm-year-analyst individual earnings forecasts for consolidated financial statements. Our findings suggest that the impact of vertical spin-off on the information environment for analysts was not negative, as additional corporate disclosure was required regarding the vertical spin-off business sector. Furthermore, we retested the results using propensity score matching. The additional test results were qualitatively similar to the main test results. The contributions of this study are as follows. Firstly, our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of vertical spin-off in reorganizing the corporate governance structure of the parent company, and its potential to impact the information environment through its effect on the number of analysts following a firm and forecast accuracy. Secondly, our study sheds light on the changes in the information environment brought about by the corporate governance reform in Korea. Lastly, our findings suggest that additional information disclosure has a significant impact on improving the information environment in the capital market, which is a meaningful contribution to the literature.