The Association between Comparability of Financial Statements and Dividends and Information Asymmetry in Korea

This study investigates whether financial statement comparability is associated with firm-specific dividends. Although several studies on the comparability, since the seminal work of De Franco et al. (2011) that developed the way to measure the comparability, has been performed frequently, the study that links the comparability with dividends is rare. This study investigates this important but ignored issue empirically with Korean data. We expect that investors and outsiders are more easily monitor management when the comparability is relatively high. Thus, the agency problem of the firms with more comparable financial statements is expected to be low, due to the intense monitoring by outsiders. As a result, we expect that firms with more comparable financial statements are more likely to pay dividends. In contrast, if comparability and dividend payment have a substitutive relation, then the firms with more comparable financial statements are more likely to pay a small dividend. Empirical results are summarized as follows: First, we find a positive association between comparability and firms’ tendency to pay dividends. Second, there is also a positive association between comparability and the amount of dividends paid. Third, we note that these tendencies are more pronounced among the firms with greater information asymmetry, suggesting that comparability plays a more important role when the level of information asymmetry is greater. In sum, these findings provide important implications to academics and other outside information users. In addition, this study contributes to policy-makers to show a way to reduce agency costs by enhancing monitoring mechanism.