감사법인특성과 회계정보가치관련성의 관계 = Audit Firm Characteristics and their Relations with Value Relevance of Audited Accounting Information

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Recent regulatory changes in accounting and audit practice are attending to audit qualityimprovements and investors’ perceptions thereon, which is now moving to identification of auditquality indicators and their disclosures to assist the investors’ evaluation of audit quality. Traditionalaudit researches and practice literature provide discussions on audit firm characteristics to be usedas possible audit quality indicators. Specifically, Big 4 firm, auditor’s industry expertise, (abnormal)audit hours and audit fees could be included as representative audit quality indicators covered bythe previous literature. Audit firm characteristics are comparable to client characteristics alsocovered by other audit researches (Hermanson et al. 2007；Lawrence et al. 2011, etc.). Morerecently, Hermanson et al. (2007), Kim and Cheon (2010), and Lee (2012), among others, focusedon audit firm characteristics identified by the regulator’s inspection reports or quality control reviewresults. Furthermore, the European Union (EU)(Article 40 of the EU 8th Company DirectiveDirector) has already established a registration to require audit firms auditing public companieslisted in the EU jurisdictions to file and disclose transparency reports to provide the investors withinformation about the audit firm’s quality controls, operation results and various audit qualityinformation. Similar regulations for Korean audit firms are established in 2003 from when Koreanaccounting firms should file annual reports with the Financial Supervisory Service (“FSS”).
Subjects underlying all these discussions and development is related to a traditional controversyabout definition of audit quality；recent literature and academic researches are beginning to covervarious aspects of audit quality. e.g. the Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession(ACAP)(2008), the International Organization of Securities Commission；IOSCO)(2009), Bedardet al. (2010), and Francis(2011) discuss feasibility of such audit quality indicators. They alsopresented various examples of audit quality indicators classified in terms of input vs. outputmeasures or audit firm－level vs. engagement－level indicators. Specifically, the IOSCO illustratedvarious audit quality indicators and the related groupings of categories. With regard to the auditquality indicators, Francis (2011) explained that there is insufficient research to know if this kind of aggregated information can tell us something about audit quality, and said that the IOSCOreport is just a list which are not rigorously investigated.
We are to fill this gap. We identify ten audit firm characteristics for the experimental variablesbased on the previous studies (Hermanson et al. 2007；Kim and Cheon 2010；Lee 2012), andinvestigate their relationship with value relevance of earnings focusing on two aspects. First, wesee whether value relevance of audited accounting information are different according to auditfirm characteristics which the previous studies reported they are associated with good (or bad)audit quality. Second, the investors are likely to consider the auditor characteristics more seriouslyin their investment decisions after regulatory changes that the FSS began to attend to thecharacteristics during its review of audit firm’s quality control systems in 2007；we examinewhether such regulatory change has impacts on value relevance of earnings according to the auditfirm characteristics. We used Ohlson (1995) model to investigate the effects of the audit firmcharacteristics on value relevance of audited accounting information. In the model, controlvariables of size, leverage, return on assets, and year, industry and audit firm dummies areincluded in the models to mitigate potential effects of selection bias.
Our results generally indicate that investors perceive positively (negatively) incremental valuerelevance of audited earnings information according to audit firm characteristics generally relatedto g...

국문 초록 (Abstract)

선행연구(Hermanson et al. 2007；김문철․전영순 2010；이재은 2012)에서는 감사인의 품질관리에 관련된 인적자원관리 특성을 나타내는 감사법인특성이 감사품질과 관련이 있음을 보고하였다. 본 연구는 선행연구에서 조사한 감사법인특성과 감사품질의 관련성에 대한 투자자들의 인식차이를, 순이익 가치관련성의 체계적 차이 유무를 통해서 실증조사한다. 실증조사 결과, 투자자는선행연구에서 양호(불량)한 감사품질과 관련이 있다고 보고한 감사법인특성에 대해서 대체로 긍정적(부정적)으로 인식하는 것으로 나타났다. 또한 감사법인특성을 주목하게 한 금감원 품질관리감리제도의 시행 전․후를 비교한 결과, 감사법인특성들에 따른 순이익 가치관련성은 동 제도의 시행이후 유사한 방향으로 증가 또는 감소하였다. 다만 제도시행 전․후 변동의 유의수준과 항목별로다소 낮게 나타났다. 이는 투자자들도 선행연구에서 보고한 방향(긍정 또는 부정적)과 유사하게 감사법인특성이 감사품질과 양 또는 음의 관계가 있다고 인식함을 나타내며, 제한적이기는 하지만이러한 인식은 회계감독제도의 변화에 따라 더 강화된 측면이 있다.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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