영업보고서상 軟性情報의 자발적 공시에 관한 연구 - '영업의 개황'을 중심으로

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines the content of 'overview of operations' section in annual reports of Korean firms. Korean firms have disclosed narrative information through the overview of operations section under little regulation on the contents and formats. This paper will help stakeholders understand this type of soft information and public policymakers design more effective and efficient regulations on the narrative disclosure if necessary.
We review the institutional backgrounds of MD&A in foreign countries and compare the MD&A with the overview of operations in Korean annual reports. Using hand-collected data, we test whether the industry membership, the time-dependent environment change and firm performance affect the level of narrative disclosure. We select four groups (environment-related, strategy/organization-related, input/effortsrelated, and output/performance-related) of keywords within the overview of operations and measure the level of narrative disclosure by the frequency of keywords in each group.
The industry comparison reveals that service firms disclose more strategy-related and input-related keywords than manufacturing firms. While manufacturing firms show the increase of output-related keywords and the decrease of strategy-related keywords, service firms show the increase of both total keywords and input-related keywords over the sample period. We also find that profit firms disclose more keywords than loss firms and that income-increasing firms disclose more keywords than income-decreasing firms. These results suggest that in the absence of regulations on narrative disclosure, Korean firms voluntarily provide soft information through the overview of operations section in annual reports and such disclosure depends on the industry membership, environment change and firm performance.