The Relationship between Related Party Transactions and Management Forecasts

Using a comprehensive sample of listed firms in Korea, we investigate the empirical association between related party transactions (hereafter, RPTs) and management forecasts. This paper discusses the impact of RPTs on management forecasts in Korea where RPTs are prevalent and strict requirements for disclosure of RPTs are conducive to RPTs dealings. Sample period is 8 years from 2002 when voluntary disclosure was enacted to 2009. Specifically, we empirically examine the effect of RPTs on management forecast bias and accuracy. Firms with frequent RPTs are likely to show managerial empire building(Cho and Kim 2013) and relatively weak internal control(AICPA 2001). Therefore, the quality of management forecasts may be overoptimistic and poor. Firms with majority shareholders have more control over RPTs and fewer external interest parties. These firms pay less attention to management forecasts, which leads to increased management forecast errors and inaccuracy. By contrast, firms with large number of analyst followings pay more attention to management forecasts due to high demand for information in the market. Results show that management forecast bias and errors decrease as RPTs increases. This suggests that RPTs increase managers’ tendency to disclose overoptimistic management forecasts. This effect is intensified in firms with majority shareholder suggesting that these firms may increase discretionary transactions as less interested parties monitor them. Therefore, these firms are likely to release overoptimistic forecasts which leads to less accurate management forecasts. Finally, firms with large analyst followings, management forecast accuracy decreases relatively less as RPTs increases. This means that even if firms have frequent RPTs, they tend to pay close attention to disclose management forecasts when with large market information demands.