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The Effect of Individual Outside Directors’ Tenure on the Financial Reporting Quality

Seon Mi Kim1 · Sook Min Kim2 · Sang Hoon Shin3

1 Professor, Dept. of Business Administration, Chonnam National University, Corresponding author, 2 Ph.D. student, College of Business Administration, Korea University, First author, 3 Ph.D. College of Economics & Business Administration, Kyonggi University

Published: May 2016 · Vol. 20 No. 2 · pp. 163-182

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kbr.2016.20.2.163

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Abstract

This Paper examines the impact of individual outside directors’ tenure on financial reporting quality. Specifically, we are looking at the impact of individual outsider directors’ tenure on the discretionary accruals introduced by Dechow et al. (1995) and Kothari et al. (2005) as a proxy of financial reporting quality. We might provide the insight whether outside directors’ tenure plays as a control mechanism. In the recent year, a few of studies starts to investigate the impact of outside directors at the individual level. For example, Yang and Kim (2013) examine the effect of outside directors on the financial reporting quality by incorporating the personal traits of directors. They use the variables whether the boards were law majors or business administration majors. In the same stream of this, the recent newspapers’ articles raised the effectiveness of outside directors at the individual level. They argue that the tenure of individual outside directors are one of the important factors to monitor the management opportunistic behaviors. Therefore, we examine the impact of outside directors’ tenure on the quality of financial reporting at the individual level. We focus on the conflicting roles by using the tenure of outside directors at the individual level as an important context of corporate government. We find that the negative impact of outside directors’ tenures on discretionary accruals, when the tenures of outside directors are longer. This finding supports the view that the tenure of outside directors may exacerbate inefficient financial information environment. It leads to ultimately internal control deficiencies. In addition, these findings are helpful to the literature which investigates the effect of personal traits in their companies by showing the inefficient effect of outside board systems.
Keywords: 개별사외이사 재임기간재무보고의 질재량적 발생액