상장여부가 재무제표의 비교가능성에 미치는 효과 = The Effect of Listing Status on Financial Statement Comparability

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines whether the listing status affects the quality of financial reporting in terms of financial statement comparability. The comparability of financial statements is considered to be a qualitative characteristic which enables accounting information users to compare financial information of a certain firm with that of its peers or with that in the different periods. It may be difficult for accounting information users to make useful decision if they cannot compare numbers in the financial statements of a firm with benchmarks such as those of peer firms or those in the past periods. Although previous studies analyze the difference in quality of financial reporting between listed firms (i.e., public firms) and unlisted firms (i.e., private firms or privately held firms), most of them focus on accounting conservatism, earnings management, or accrual quality (Ball and Shivakumar 2005; Burgstahler et al. 2006; Hope et al. 2013). Also, although there has been a growing body of literature on the accounting comparability, the effect of listing status on the financial statement comparability is still unknown. To fill this gap in the prior accounting literature, we address the question on whether the quality of financial reporting differs between listed firms and unlisted firms from the perspective of accounting comparability, as suggested in De Franco et al. (2011). Unlike listed companies which trade their stocks to the general public, an unlisted firm is held privately by a small number of shareholders without separation of ownership and management. Consequently, unlisted firms have less capital market pressures due to a relatively small number of owners compared to listed firms. The low capital market pressure in turn would give unlisted firms an incentive to avoid corporate tax at the expense of high financial reporting quality, causing a difference in the financial statement comparability between unlisted firms and listed firms. In contrast, the financial reporting of listed firms is more strictly regulated because listed firms are more likely to have greater capital market pressures, greater ownership dispersion and greater number of disclosures. Listed firms also face strong demands from stakeholders such as investors and creditors for reliable financial information, which motivates listed firms to produce higher quality financial information. Based on this discussion, we hypothesize that the financial statements of listed firms are more comparable than those of unlisted firms. To investigate the addressed research question, we first estimate the comparability of net income following De Franco et al. (2011) and Francis et al. (2014). We also consider the comparability of two elements of net income, cash flow from operations and total accruals. We collect the sample from all listed companies in the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) and Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (KOSDAQ) as well as all unlisted firms audited by an external auditor between 2008 and 2014. The final sample is 33,543 firms-year observations, consisting of non-financial firms with fiscal month of December. The main results are as follows. Firstly, after controlling for factors which are expected to affect the comparability of financial reporting of a firm, accounting comparability of listed firms in terms of net income, cash flow from operations, and total accruals appears to be significantly higher than that of unlisted firms. This result implies listed firms provide more useful accounting information in terms of financial statement comparability than unlisted firms do. Secondly, all results still remain when we partition the sample into two subsamples based on the following dimensions: (1) firms audited by Big 4 auditor vs. those by non-Big 4 auditor, (2) Pre-IFRS adoption period vs. Post-IFRS adoption period, (3) firms with auditor change vs. firms without auditor change, and (4) firms listed on the KSE and unlisted firms vs. firms listed on the KOSDAQ and unlisted firms. Thus, our main findings regarding the effect of listed status on the financial statement comparability are robust to audit quality, IFRS mandatory adoption, auditor change, and stock exchange type of listed firms. To summarize, this study makes several contributions to the current accounting literature. First, we reveal that the listing status is an important factor on the financial statement comparability. This is the first paper to address the difference in the accounting comparability between listed firms and unlisted firms. Second, our findings can provide additional empirical evidence to the related accounting research (for example, accounting literature on the comparison of earnings quality between listed firms and unlisted firms, and/or that on the accounting comparability). Also, this study discusses the financial statement comparability from the perspectives of capital market characteristics, especially capital market demands on the quality of financial reporting, rather than from the perspectives of information users documented in the previous studies. Finally, the empirical evidence of this paper can shed light into the effect of listing status on the comparability of financial statements, which serves as an important empirical evidence to practitioners, business corporations, accounting standard setters, policy makers as well as academia. Also, our study contributes not only to the debate on unlisted versus listed financial statement comparability but also to the broader literature attempting to understand the determinants of financial reporting quality.