This study begins with the assumption that the impact of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance differs by the level of corporate performance. Generally, it can be assumed that the firm with high level of performance has spent enter...
This study begins with the assumption that the impact of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance differs by the level of corporate performance. Generally, it can be assumed that the firm with high level of performance has spent entertainment expenses which are more relevant to their profit generating activities and thus have higher level of impact to the performance. At the same time, it can be assumed that the firm with low level of performance has spent entertainment expenses which are less relevant to their profit generating activities and have lower level of impact to the performance. In other words, the firm’s performance is determined according to the degree of which the entertainment expenses are relevant to their profit generating activities. This study aims to identify how the impact of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance differs among the firms with different levels of corporate performance.
Previous studies for the corporate entertainment expenses have used typical OLS regression analysis which assumes that the regression coefficients are constant throughout whole sample firms with different levels of performance. Therefore, it was not feasible to find the differences of the regression coefficients which imply the relevance of entertainment expenses to the firm’s profit generating activities by using the typical OLS regression analysis and therefore could not be used to verify the research hypothesis of this study.
This study used the quantile regression analysis which allows to estimate the differential impacts of the covariates(entertainment expenses) along the conditional distribution of the response variable(the firm’s performance). To test the hypothesis that the impact of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance differs among firms with different levels of performance, 0.25 quantile and 0.75 quantile of the firm’s performance was used in quantile regression analysis. In addition, these tests were performed to the samples for small and medium sized firms and for large sized firms, separately.
The results of this study are summarized as followings:
First, in OLS regression analysis, the regression coefficient of corporate entertainment expenses implied the effects of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance as 0.977 throughout whole sample firms, while in Q50 quantile regression analysis, it was 1.329 throughout whole sample firms. Therefore, Q50 quantile regression analysis tends to show higher level of the relevance of entertainment expenses to the firm’s profit generating activities than the typical OLS regression analysis.
Second, in Q25 quantile regression analysis for companies with low level of performance, it showed a very high regression coefficient of corporate entertainment expenses, that is, 2.202. In Q75 quantile regression analysis for companies with high level of performance, it showed a very low regression coefficient, that is, 0.068, which was not significant statistically. The test result of the difference between Q25 quantile regression coefficient and Q75 quantile regression coefficient was significant at 1% level. This result confirmed to the hypothesis that the impact of corporate entertainment expenses on corporate performance differs between firms with different levels of performance. This result, however, showed that companies with low level of performance have spent entertainment expenses which are more relevant to their profit generating activities, while companies with high level of performance have spent entertainment expenses which are less relevant to their profit generating activities. So this result showed the opposite relations to the assumption this study made.
Third, for the case of control variables, company size and debt ratio showed consistent results with entertainment expenses. On the other hand, discretionary sales and management expenses, and foreign ownership rate showed opposite result from entertainment expenses. Welfare expenses of employees showed constant regression coefficient for all firms except for the extreme low or the extreme high performance firms.
Fourth, the results from the large sized firms were almost consistent with that of whole sample firms.
Finally, The results from the small and medium sized firms were not consistent with the result from whole sample firms and from the large sized firms. In the case of the small and medium sized firms, for the firms with mid-level performance, the regression coefficients of corporate entertainment expenses which imply the impacts of corporate entertainment expenses on the firms’ performance were the highest, while for the firms with low and high performance level, the regression coefficients were low and were not different. The results from the control variables showed similar results with that of whole sample firms and from the large sized firms.
Taken together, this study suggests that the corporate entertainment expenses have heterogeneous impact on the firms’ performance depending on the level of firms’ performance and size of the firms.