The study investigates the effect of the widened daily stock price limits on the usefulness of accounting information in Korea: 1) whether investors place a higher importance on audit quality, an indicator of the reliability of accounting information, and 2) whether there are differences in the relationships between audit quality and stock-price earning-rates two years before and after June 15, 2016. This study employs samples of two years (2013 to 2015) before the widening and two years after the widening (2016 to 2017). The samples are limited to the companies listed on the Korea Stock Exchange, accounting settled in December, collected from Fn-Guide and TS-2000 of the Korea Listed Companies Association. The results show that the positive association between audit quality and stock return was increased during the later period, compared to the preceding period. This tendency was more evident in companies with higher debt ratios and companies with lower levels of income smoothing, which is considered to have higher risks. The findings suggest that it is the first study evaluating the effect of widening daily stock price limits, made on June 15, 2015, on the usefulness of audit quality information by examining the relevance between audit quality and stock return.

This paper focused on the level of managerial centralization on chief executive officer (CEO) as a factor to affect the shared growth activities of corporate. As service corporations are becoming active in shared growth activities recently, this paper thus used CEO. Pay Slice (CPS) information to measure the level of managerial centralization on CEO of service corporation and tested the influence of the level of managerial centralization on whether shared growth activities are executed and the level of such activities respectively. The result of test shows that companies with high managerial centralization on CEO are more passive toward shared growth activities than those without such centralization. This can be interpreted that a CEO with more powerful influence may consider shared growth activities as to be negative and take a passive attitude to them. On the other hand, such result was supported by additional analysis with companies committing shared growth activities as well. This paper is expected to contribute to bring about interest on shared growth activities as the gap between major companies and small and medium sized companies is currently expanding in terms of operating profit ratio and even salary of employees.

Purpose - The present study examined the reliability of accounting information based on the pay slice (CPS) information of chief executive officers (CEOs) in the service industry. The difference in the size of CPS under the capitalist system can be used as an index to gauge the influence of top management. Research design, data, and methodology - In accordance with the amendment of the Financial Investment Services and Capital Market Act in 2013, the pay information of individual registered executives with annual salary of more than 500 million won has been disclosed. The sample of the current study is 232 companies listed on the Korea Exchange excluding financial services from 2013 to 2015, when the individual pay-slice information for registration officers was published in the business report in accordance with the revision of the Capital Market Act. The financial data required for this study were extracted from the FnGuide and the TS-2000. With the data, we tested the relationship between CPS and accounting information reliability through a linear regression analysis. Results – The first result showed that the relationship between the CPS and human resource in internal accounting control system in the service industry is significantly negative only with the accounting department personnel. This result implied that the CEO can negatively affect the retention of the accounting department in the firm. Second, both the CPS and quality of audit in the service industry are negatively related both to audit fees and to audit time. Nonetheless, the relationship between the number of the auditor and the CPS is insignificant. This result indicated that the CEO can negatively affect audit fees and audit time of external auditors. The results of the present study suggested that CPS information may have a negative impact on the reliability of accounting information. Conclusion - This study is the first study to examine the reliability of CPS and accounting information for the service industry in terms of human resources in internal accounting control system and audit quality. Therefore, the present study is expected to provide some useful information to economic decision-making of various external parties for service firms.