近年來，分期分級董事會制度(Staggered Board)作為公司治理的議題之一，逐漸廣為人知、並開始被全球的企業所採用。本文旨在探討分期分級董事會制度對財務報表可比性(Financial Statement Comparability)的影響、以及兩者間的關聯性。我們使用西元1998年至2018年之美國上市公司作為研究樣本進行實證分析，且本文之分期分級董事會制度之定義方式沿襲Faleye (2007)與Zhao and Chen (2008)；財務報表可比性的計算方法則參照De Franco et al. (2011)。
實證結果顯示，分期分級董事會制度與財務報表可比性呈現顯著之正相關，顯示分期分級董事會制度的存在將使公司高層的職位穩定性增加，進而減少、甚至停止為了不被解雇而執行的盈餘操縱行為，從而提升財務報表的可比程度。從實證結果中亦可發現，在使用分期分級董事會制度的情況下，年齡較輕、受機構投資人監督程度高的公司，將對財務報表可比性產生相對更強的效果；此外，本文發現上述分期分級董事會制度對於財務報表可比性之顯著效力顯著集中於營運績效並非在排名前段的公司之中。;In last decades, the policy of staggered board has gradually become widely known and has been adopted by the firms around the world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the staggered board and financial statement comparability. We use the data of listed firms in the United States with the period from 1998 to 2018 as our sample. Besides, we follow Faleye (2007), Zhao and Chen (2008) to define the variable for firms’ adoption of staggered board. As for the definition of financial statement comparability, we use the methodology proposed by De Franco et al. (2011) to calculate it.
The empirical results show that the adoption of staggered board increase the quality of firms’ financial statement comparability significantly. It reveals that the adoption of staggered board prevents the directors and managers from being laid off, which will consequently stop their earning manipulation behavior for the purpose of keeping their jobs and then improve the financial statement comparability. The empirical results also show that the effects of the adoption of staggered board are greater in firms with younger age or higher institutional ownership. Furthermore, we find that these effects are more pronounced in non-outperform firms.
