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본 연구는 재무보고의 질과 현금보유 수준 간의 관계를 살펴보고, 또한 채권자 측면에서 현금보유의 가치가 재무보고의 질에 따라 다른지를 실증적으로 분석하였다. 선행연구들은 주로 당기 재량적 발생액이나 총발생액의 질과 현금보유와의 관계나 이익의 질이 낮은 기업에서의 현금보유의 가치가 할인되는지를 투자자 측면에서 주로 살펴보았다(Sun et al. 2012; Shin et al. 2018 등). 이와 달리, 본 연구는 Hutton et al.(2009) 및 전규안과 박종일(2017)의 방법인 재무보고의 불투명성 또는 Francis et al.(2005) 모형에서 총발생액의 질과 그 구성요소를 중심으로 살펴본다는 점과, 또한 재무보고의 불투명성이 높거나 발생액의 질이 낮은 기업들에서 현금보유의 증가가 채권자 측면에서 할인되는지를 기업이 부담하는 부채조달비용과의 관계를 통해 살펴보았다는 점에서 이전 연구와는 차이가 있다. 분석을 위해 본 연구는 현금보유의 대용치로 현금보유, 산업조정 현금보유 및 비정상 현금보유의 세 가지 수준변수를 이용하였다. 분석기간은 2003년부터 2016년까지, 표본은 금융업종을 제외한 12월이 결산인 상장기업이다. 실증결과는 첫째, 재무보고의 불투명성이 높거나 발생액의 질 및 그 구성요소(본질적 또는 재량적 발생액의 질)가 각각 낮을 때 기업의 현금보유 수준은 유의하게 높게 나타나, 전반적으로 재무보고의 질이 낮은 기업일수록 정보비대칭이 높기에 완충제로 보유현금의 비축이 더 높았다. 둘째, 현금보유 수준은 부채조달비용에 대하여 음(-)의 관계를, 재무보고의 불투명성이 높은 기업은 부채조달비용에 양(+)의 관계를, 그러나 현금보유 수준과 재무보고의 불투명성(OPAQUE1) 간의 상호작용변수의 경우 부채조달비용과 유의한 양(+)의 관계를 발견할 수 없었다. 즉 재무보고의 질이 낮은 기업들에서 현금보유 수준이 증가하더라도 채권자는 현금의 한계가치를 할인하지는 않는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 발견은 투자자 측면의 결과와는 다른 증거였다. 이상의 본 연구결과는 재무보고의 불투명성이 높거나 낮은 발생액의 질과 그 구성요소 모두는 현금보유와 양(+)의 관계가 있으나, 채권자는 부채조달비용 측면에서 재무보고의 질이 낮은 기업들에서 현금보유 수준이 높더라도 이를 부정적으로 평가하여 현금의 한계가치를 할인하지는 않음을 시사한다. 본 연구는 기업의 현금보유의 가치가 채권자 측면에서 재무보고의 질에 따라 다른지를 살펴본 처음의 연구라는 점에서도 의의가 있다. 따라서 본 연구결과는 현금보유 및 재무보고의 질을 분석한 관련연구에 채권자 측면의 새로운 증거를 제공한다.
We investigate whether the effect of financial reporting quality on cash holdings, and we also examine the extent to which excess cash holdings influence cost of debt. Specifically, we explore whether creditors place a lower their marginal value on cash holdings among firms with poor financial reporting quality. The relationship between cash holdings and the quality of earnings is interesting and important from the perspective of both cash and earnings quality. Poor earning quality aggravates information asymmetry between managers and external stakeholders. The information asymmetry causes misvaluation of firm securities and makes it harder and more expensive for firms to raise external capital (e.g., Sun et al. 2012). This provides an additional motivation for firms to hoard cash for operational and investment needs (Shin et al. 2018). Meanwhile, The previous research find that poor earnings quality (i.e., low accruals quality) has a negative impact on the value of corporate cash holdings and a positive impact on the level of cash reserves (Sun et al. 2012). Thus, agency considerations persuade investors to discount the value of corporate cash holdings out of concern about the inappropriate use of funds. Also, the prior study find that firms with poor earnings quality (i.e., high discretionary accruals as proxies for earnings quality) are more likely to discount the marginal value of their excess cash holdings because their shareholders appear to question the reason for such cash policy changes from the agency theory perspective (Shin et al. 2018). Different from investors’ response in the prior study, we focus on how cash influences cost of debt by creditors. In particular, we focus on the interaction terms because they reflect the effect of poor financial reporting quality on the marginal value of excess cash holdings. For analysis, we use three accounting based measures of financial reporting quality (FRQ), following Hutton et al. (2009), Jeon and Park (2017), and Francis et al. (2005) model. Following Hutton et al. (2009), we measure first proxy for FRQ (i.e., opaque financial reports, hereafter OPAQUE1) in year t as the three-year moving sum of the absolute value of annual discretionary accruals (DA), which is calculated over years t-2 through t. Following Jeon and Park (2017), we measure second proxy for FRQ (hereafter OPAQUE2) in year t as the standard deviation of discretionary accruals (t-2∼t). Finally, we follow Francis et al. (2005) to estimate accruals quality (AQ), and we also decompose the AQ into its innate and discretionary factors (i.e., InnateAQ and DiscAQ) as a proxy of information risk for FRQ in year t as the standard deviation of accrual quality, which is calculated over years t-4 through t. DA and AQ based on the Dechow et al. (1995) model and Francis et al. (2005) model are estimated cross-sectionally per year using all firm-year observations in the same two-digit KIS industry. We use three measures of firm’s cash holdings. These measure include (1) the level of cash holdings (hereafter Cash1: defined as cash/assets), (2) Industry-adjusted cash holdings (hereafter Cash2: excess cash after subtracting the industry specific mean from each Cash1 variable), and (3) abnormal cash holdings (hereafter Cash3: following Oler and Picconi (2014) model, we utilize the residuals from regressions). And following the prior study (e.g., Park and Yoon 2013; Park and Jung 2017 etc.), we employ the average interest rates and yield spread as proxies for the cost of debt. Our sample covers KOSPI and KOSDAQ listed firms from 2003 to 2016 based on the dependent variable. The empirical findings of this paper are following. First, we find that after controlling for several factors that affect cash holdings, firms with poor (good) financial reporting quality (i.e., OPAQUE1, OPAQUE2, AQ as well as InnateAQ and DiscAQ) tend to hold more (less) cash holdings. This finding supports the information asymmetry argument that poor financial reporting quality aggravates information asymmetry and makes raising external capital more difficult and more expensive for firms. Thus, firms with poor financial reporting quality are more likely to accumulate excess cash holdings. Second, we find that after controlling for several factors that affect the cost of debt, we find that a significant and negative association between cash holdings (i.e., Cash1∼Cash3) and cost of debt, we also find that a significant and positive association between poor financial reporting quality (i.e., OPAQUE1, OPAQUE2) and cost of debt. However, the interaction variable between excess cash holdings and poor financial reporting quality (i.e., OPAQUE1) have significant and negative coefficients. This results are inconsistent with the prediction of the hypothesis 2 that poor financial reporting quality lowers the value of cash holdings, and also inconsistent with the results on the side of investors in prior studies (i.e., Sun et al. 2012; Shin and Kim 2016; Park and Kwak 2016; Shin et al. 2018 etc.). Therefore, this results provide a counter perspective to investors’ reaction. Thus, this findings provides novel evidence that firms with more cash holdings regardless of poor financial reporting quality are associated with a lower cost of debt. In sum, our study adds to the literature on the determinants of the level of corporate cash holdings. Our results show that besides the determinants of cash holdings identified in extant literature, financial reporting quality (i.e., opaque financial reports, innate accruals quality and discretionary accruals quality) is also a significant factor influencing the level of cash held by Korea’s listed firms. As well as, our results add to the prior studies finding by showing that poor earnings quality also lowers the value of corporate cash holdings. In addition, our results documents that creditors place a higher value on excess cash holdings regardless of poor financial reporting quality. In contract, the prior studies shows that investors place a lower value on cash among firms with poor financial reporting quality. To our knowledge, our findings represent the first documented results in the cash holdings related researches regarding the effect of financial reporting quality on the marginal value of cash holdings in terms of cost of debt by creditors. Therefore, our results provide implications to academia as well as investors, practitioners, regulators, and policy-makers.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Cash holdings, Value of cash holdings, Financial reporting quality, Opaque financial reports, Accrual quality, Financial constraint, Cost of debt
