The Effect of Management Disclosure and Analysis on the Stock Crash Risk: Evidence from Korea

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of quality of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosure on stock price crash risk. The MD&A can be seen to reflect the management's intention on public announcement and reveals directly what the management says to communicate with outside investors. A firm's high-quality MD&A implies the management's commitment to communicating with the market, not allowing the managers to have incentives to hoard unfavorable news, which if revealed to the public, may lead to downward stock price corrections, damaging corporate values. The high-quality MD&A is, thus, likely to reduce the stock price crash risk. We use a logistic regression to test whether MD&A influences crash risk using listed companies in the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) stock market between 2010 and 2013. Findings of the empirical test show that the higher the quality of MD&A, the less likely crash risk appears, implying that the MD&A disclosed adequately can be one of the factors mitigating firm's stock price crash risk. This study has implications as it presents the MD&A disclosure as a factor influencing stock price crash risk and suggests voluntary disclosure as well as mandatory disclosure acts as a variable that explains the risk of stock price crash.