This study examines the effects of the adoption of International Accounting Standards No. 12, Income Taxes (IAS No.12) on the incremental information about future profitability for firms reporting losses compared to Korean Generally Accepted Accounting No.16, Accounting for Income Taxes (K-GAAP No.16). Specifically, this paper shows that whether the IAS No.12 affects the information of deferred tax assets (DTAs) regarding loss persistence which implies the ability to predict earnings sustainability. Using a sample of 2,905 observations from Korean listed firms that reported a loss between 2007 and 2014, we divide loss firm-years into categories of ‘good news’ (GN) or ‘bad news’ (BN) based on whether management appears to report an increase in DTAs. We find that our tax categories have incremental information about the probability of loss reversal under K-GAAP No. 16, but under IAS No.12 the incremental effects of a deferred tax balance disappear. Also, we find that investors underweight the informativeness of DTAs under K-GAAP, and after the adoption of IAS No.12, investors cannot obtain buy-and-hold returns by buying GN firm-years and selling BN firms-years. However, this is not because investors understand the information of DTAs, but because the informativeness of DTAs deteriorates after the relaxation in the recognition threshold of DTAs.

A B S T R A C TThis study examines and compares investors' and analysts' biases in interpreting book-tax difference (hereafter BTD). The empirical results of using 1,544 Korean firm-year observations from 2001 to 2008 are as follows. First, we find that BTD is negatively associated with the value-price (V/P) ratio. This result implies that investors have more optimistic biases than analysts do in interpreting BTD. Second, for high institutional ownership sample, the negative association between BTD and V/P ratio would disappear. This empirical result suggests that sophisticated institutional investors understand the meaning of BTD better than general investors. Third, for lower analyst following sample, there was no significant association between BTD and V/P ratios. This implies that higher analyst following reduces biases in analysts' earnings forecasts. This study adds to the growing body of evidence that is related to the efficiency of analysts' earnings forecasts. It is the first empirical study to show that investors do not fully incorporate the meaning of BTD into their stock pricing compared with analysts' earnings forecasts.

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