This study analyzes the relationship between industry competition and financial reporting opacity. Industry competition refers to the degree of competition between firms within the same industry. This industry competition not only indicates an industr...
This study analyzes the relationship between industry competition and financial reporting opacity. Industry competition refers to the degree of competition between firms within the same industry. This industry competition not only indicates an industry structure but also affects a decision to be made by a manager in a company belonging to a particular industry. The decision may affect the firm’s value chain(including sales and production) and the manager’s financial reporting. There is a view that industry competition can reduce the incentives for managers to intervene in financial reporting to pursue his/her private interests by playing a role as an external corporate governance. Another view is that industry competition could induce the manager’s intervention in the financial reporting process as the competition decreasing the firm’s profitability may increase the risk of manager turnover. The prior accounting literature provides inconsistent conclusions depending on the samples tested.
In this regard, this study examines the financial reporting opacity(i.e. lack of transparency) measured by discretionary accruals over a three-year period by taking a differenct view from prior literature. This study analyzed whether the industry competition affects the firm’s financial reporting opacity by using samples from KOSPI and KOSDAQ for the period of 2011 to 2020.
The industry competition is measured using the Herfindahl-Hirschmann index, and financial reporting opacity is measured as the sum of the three-year absolute discretionary accruals which was introduced in Hutton et al.(2009).
The test results are summarized as follows. First, even after considering control variables, as the degree of industry competition intensifies, the financial reporting opacity measured by the sum of absolute discretionary accrual for three years increases. This provides an implication that competition within the industry can induce the manager’s intervention in financial reporting due to the risk of manager replacement as the competition reduces a firm’s profitability rather than playing a role as an external corporate governance. Second, the positive relationship between the industry competition and the financial reporting opacity is pronounced more when the foreign shareholder ownership is lower, and the debt to equity ratio is higher. These results are still valid even when the financial reporting opacity is measured differently(Jeon and Park, 2017) or the effects of heteroscedasticity and extreme observations are considered.
This study provides a contribution to the literature by analyzing the impact of industry competition on a firm’s financial reporting opacity, unlike prior studies focusing on the relationship between industry competition and earnings quality.