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우리나라에서 2002년 11월에 도입된 공정공시제도는 경영자가 기업에 대한 중요한 정보를 재무분석가나 기관투자자 등 특정인에게 선별적으로 제공하고자 하는 경우, 모든 시장참가자들이 동 정보를 알 수 있도록 증권시장을 통해 이를 사전적으로 공시하도록 하는 제도이다. 이러한 공정공시제도의 효과와 관련하여 선행연구들은 공정공시일의 주가변동성이나 재무분석가 이익예측치의 정확성 등을 검증함으로써 공정공시제도의 효과를 분석하였다. 그러나 이들 선행연구들에서는 공정공시제도에 따라 회계이익의 유용성이 어떻게 변화하였는지에 대해서는 구체적인 분석이 이루어지고 있지 못하다. 이에 본 연구에서는 공정공시제도의 도입에 따라 회계이익의 가치관련성이 어떻게 달라지는지를 분석함으로써 공정공시제도의 도입에 따라 회계이익의 유용성에 어떠한 변화가 나타났는지를 분석하였다. 이의 분석을 위하여 본 연구에서는 1999년부터 2006년까지의 기간을 대상으로 공정공시제도 도입을 전후하여 일정 기간 동안에 나타나는 회계이익의 가치관련성 변화를 살펴보았다. 분석 결과, 공정공시제도의 도입 이후, 전체 기업에 대한 회계이익의 가치관련성은 유의하게 증가하는 모습을 보였으며, 공정공시 미시행기업의 경우, 회계이익의 가치관련성은 공정공시제도 도입 이후 기간에 증가하지 않는 반면, 공정공시 시행기업의 회계이익의 가치관련성은 공정공시제도 도입 이전 기간에 비해 유의하게 증가하는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 공정공시제도의 도입에 따라 회계이익 정보의 선별적 제공이 제한됨으로써 자본시장의 정보비대칭이 완화되고 결과적으로 회계정보의 유용성이 증가된다는 것을 의미한다.
In Korea, Regulation Fair Disclosure(RFD, hereafter) was adopted in November, 2002. The purpose of RFD is to prevent the selective provision of information on firms to selected interested parties, and to urge firms to announce the same information to the public that they want to give to the selected parties such as analysts or institutional investors. By blocking selective disclosure through the RFD, regulators’ intention was to eliminate any informational advantages that had benefited the selected parties only. Prior studies in Korea show that the enforcement of RFD reduced the leakage of advanced information (Lee & Choi, 2004), which implies that information asymmetry among market participants was mitigated after the adoption of RFD. For example, volatility of abnormal returns or variation of stock trading volume has been decreased on the disclosure day in the concerned industries (Kim et al, 2005). And Oh & Sohn (2006) showed that there was significant decrease in both analysts’ forecasting performance and their optimistic bias after the enforcement of RFD. Foreign prior studies also show that RFD reduces volatility of abnormal return in the earings announcement day, the leakage of advanced information, and the trading expense. Many studies also show that the forecasting accuracy has not been declined even if relative uncertainty in the forecasting of earnings has become large (Shane et al., 2001; Heflin et al., 2003; Gadarowski and Sinha., 2007; Eleswarapu et al., 2004). Although many prior studies, domestic or foreign, showed that (the 생략) RFD has positive effects as mentioned above, however, it might have negative effects as well. RFD can restrict the communication between analysts (or institutional investors) and firm managers, which leads to the result that analysts might have difficulty in gathering private information needed to forecast future earnings from managers. In addition, there could be a loss in available information for investors, because it is likely that managers are reluctant to announce information due to both the complicated procedure of RFD and penalties against unfair disclosure. Additionally, whether to disclose or not is subject to managers’ arbitrary decision because of the ambiguity of the related regulations concerned with the requirement which the firms should disclose to satisfy the RFD. In the stream of research that we have seen in the above, we could not find any studies as to whether the usefulness of accounting earnings has changed after the adoption of RFD. Therefore, the purpose of our paper is to examine whether the adoption of the RFD has increased the value relevance of earnings or not. By doing so, we hope that we could answer the question, whether RFD has made positive effects on the usefulness of accounting information. Value relevance as a summary indicator of informativeness of accounting numbers is related with the question, “how well the accounting information summaries every information that affects stock price ex post facto at least”. However, the most prominent problem about the value relevance is that current stock price is a noisy proxy about true firm value. So we can measure the value relevance by estimating how much the accounting information include distinct information independent with current stock price about true firm value. (Kwon et al, 2010. p.569) In this respect, by blocking selective disclosure, the earnings information can be transferred faster. In this case, we can expect that the relation of earnings and returns would be improved. If this expectation is appropriate, we can believe that earnings information would be transferred to the market participants more quickly by RFD. And then RFD might increase value relevance in the capital market. In this context we can find the validity of the RFD in the accounting perspective. To achieve our purpose, we selected the sample for the period from 1999 to 2006, and analyzed the changes in value-relevance of accounting earnings before and after the adoption og RFD. The results showed 1) the value-relevance of accounting earnings has increased significantly for the entire firms after the adoption of RFD, 2) for the firms that did not practice fair disclosure, increase in value-relevance of accounting earnings has not been observed, and 3) however, for the firms that did practice fair disclosure, the value-relevance of accounting earnings has increased more after the adoption of RFD compared with before the adoption of RFD. These results imply that with the adoption of RFD, selective provision of accounting information is restricted, information asymmetry in capital markets is also mitigated, and, as their results, the usefulness in accounting information is increased. Compared to prior studies, this paper has two distinctive implications as follows. Firstly, most of prior studies have analyzed the changes in information asymmetry driven from RFD. Concretely they examined the market response around the event day, which was mainly the date when regulators announced that they would enforce fair disclosure, or measured the increase or decrease in the accuracy of earnings forecasts by analysts after RFD, However, the prior studies have not worked on the concrete analysis about how RFD has affected the informativeness of earnings. In this kind of research stream, we investigated the effect of RFD on the value relevance which is an important measure of accounting earnings’ usefulness. So we expect that our paper would tell how RFD improves the usefulness of accounting information by analyzing the changes in value-relevance of accounting earnings before and after the adoption of RFD. Secondly, most Korean prior studies have made short-term analyses such as the effect of the RFD by event study or immediate effect after the adoption of the system. Our study, however, analyzed the long-term effect of RFD by seeing value relevance of accounting earnings for eight years, each four years before and after the adoption, respectively. Nevertheless, our study has limitations as follows. Firstly, compared to the firms not practicing fair disclosures, firms practicing fair disclosures show value relevance significantly high after RED, but the significance level is about 10 percent, which means that our results is not robust. So we are hoping for studies that would back up our conclusion. The way of backing up could be adding more samples, rearranging samples used in this paper and so on. Secondly, it is risky to generalize the conclusion of our study to every firms because we could not observe the effect of RFD on small firms. We guess that the reason is not the ineffectiveness of RFD but the prejudiced market response toward the small firms. Even if a small firms disclose well, market may not trust the announcement for the simple reason that they are small ones. This kind of facts would be a subject studied afterward. In conclusion, we believe that the adoption of RFD improves informational environment in capital market and then strengthens value relevance. But in the cases of firms not practicing fair disclosure and small firms, there exist no effect of RFD. Therefore, we believe that we need to make some improvements to RFD to help it function properly.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Regulation Fair Disclosure, Value Relevance, Return-earnings Model, Informativeness of Earnings
