Institutional Investors and Earnings Management in the Korean Stock Market

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether the effectiveness of institutional monitoring varies depending on the economic conditions of emerging capital markets. By analysing the Korean context, we find that the proportion of institutional trading negatively correlates with income smoothing. This finding indicates that, given the Korean market’s structural characteristics (high ownership concentration, large systematic risk, and a high proportion of individual investors), institutional investors, on average, have a strong preference for short-term investments, which may lead to an increase in managers’ opportunistic earnings reporting to meet institutional investors’ earnings expectations. We select our sample period, with the 2008 financial crisis at its centre, and compare the relationship between the proportion of institutional trading and income smoothing across periods before and after the crisis. Notably, our findings show that, in Korea, the diminished effectiveness of institutional monitoring is more pronounced in the post-financial crisis period, characterised by sluggish market growth. Therefore, within emerging capital markets in a period of low market growth, institutional investors’ long-term investment preferences and monitoring may be subdued because the costs of institutional monitoring may outweigh its benefits. This study provides an improved understanding of the variations in institutional monitoring in emerging capital markets brought on by the market’s structural properties and conditions.