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Earnings quality is of great concern to corporate stakeholders, including capital providers in international markets with widely varying regulatory pedigrees and ownership patterns. This paper aims to examine the association between the cost of equity capital and earnings quality, contextualised via tests that incorporate the potential for moderating effects around institutional settings. The analysis focuses on and compares evidence relating to (common law) UK/US firms and (civil law) German firms over the period 2005–2018 and seeks to identify whether, given institutional dissimilarities, significant differences exist between the two settings.

First, the authors undertake a review of the extant literature on the link between earnings quality and the cost of capital. Second, using a sample of 948 listed companies from the USA, the UK and Germany over the period 2005 to 2018, the authors estimate four implied cost of equity capital proxies. The relationship between companies’ cost of equity capital and their earnings quality is then investigated.

Consistent with theoretical reasoning and prior empirical analyses, the authors find a statistically negative association between earnings quality, evidenced by information relating to accruals and the cost of equity capital. However, when they extend the analysis by investigating the combined effect of institutional ownership and earnings quality on financing cost, the impact – while negative overall – is found to vary across legal backdrops.

This paper uses institutional ownership as a mediating variable in the association between earnings quality and the cost of equity capital, but this is not intended to suggest that other measures may be of relevance here and additional research might usefully expand the analysis to incorporate other forms of ownership including state and foreign bases. Second, and suggestive of another avenue for developing the work presented in the study, the authors have used accrual measures of earnings quality.

The results are shown to provide potentially important insights for policymakers, creditors and investors about the consequences of earnings quality variability. The results should be of interest to firms seeking to reduce their financing costs and retain financial viability in the wake of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The reported findings extends the single-country results of Eliwa et al. (2016) for the UK firms and Francis et al. (2005) for the USA, whereby both reported that the cost of equity capital is negatively associated with earnings quality attributes. Second, in a further increment to the extant literature (particularly Francis et al., 2005 and Eliwa et al., 2016), the authors find the effect of institutional ownership to be influential, with a significantly positive impact on the association between earnings quality and the cost of equity capital, suggesting in turn that institutional ownership can improve firms’ ability to secure cheaper funding by virtue of robust monitoring. While this result holds for the whole sample (the USA, the UK and Germany), country-level analysis shows that the result holds only for the common law countries (the UK and the USA) and not for Germany, consistent with the notion that extant legal systems are a determining factor in this context. This novel finding points to a role for institutional investors in watching and improving the quality of financial reports that are valued by the market in its price formation activity.

This paper aims to examine the effect of the corporate ethical approach on the cost of equity capital. This study is conducted on a large international sample on behalf of the world’s most engaged firms from an ethical point of view in 2015.

The multivariate linear regression model is used to meet the purpose of this study and research hypotheses are also examined using a sample of 80 of most ethical firms in the world during the year 2015. Moreover, three variables (i.e. business ethics, corporate social responsibility and executive compensation based on the achievement of sustainable development goals) are used to reflect the corporate ethical approach and the implied cost of equity capital is used for estimating the cost of equity. In this regard, equity cost estimation is the most appropriate approach to test the effect of business ethics on the cost of financing firms.

Based on a sample of 80 firms emerging as the world’s most ethical firms in 2015, the results revealed that firms with better ethics scores are significantly associated with a reduced cost of equity capital. This paper also demonstrates that the executive incentive pays that are based on the objectives of sustainable development are able to explain different outcomes regarding the relation between corporate ethical behaviors and the cost of equity. These findings support arguments in the literature that firms with socially responsible practices have a higher valuation and lower risk.

This study provides implications for global regulators and policymakers when setting social reporting standards, suggesting that corporate ethical engagement reduces the cost of equity capital by decreasing the information asymmetry and thereby reducing the firms’ risk. Therefore, the findings may be informative to international managers and investors when considering the effect of business ethics on the firm’s ex-ante cost of equity. In this perspective, the voluntary disclosure of information makes it possible to mitigate the problems of asymmetry of information and conflict of interest between the firm and its main providers of capital, which could reduce the cost of equity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of voluntary disclosure, ownership structure attributes and timely disclosure on cost of equity capital in the emerging Egyptian capital market.

A content analysis of annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary disclosure. Earnings announcement lag (EAL) is used to measure the quality of voluntary disclosure (i.e. timely disclosure). Finally, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework is used to estimate cost of equity capital.

The authors find a negative relationship between the level of voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital. More specifically, the authors document that this association is strongly significant under high ownership dispersion, low government ownership and shorter EAL. Finally, EAL is positively associated with cost of equity capital.

The authors use the CAPM framework as a proxy for the cost of equity since forecasted earnings per share are not communicated by financial analysts in the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

The findings demonstrate for managers that the increased levels of voluntary and timely disclosure reduce the cost of external finance and improve the marketability of firms’ equities, which may directly impact growth opportunities especially when information is communicated to investors in a timely fashion. For regulators, it provides evidence that high government ownership reduces the value relevance of voluntary disclosure among investors, while free float as a proxy for high ownership dispersion improves it.

The findings show that corporate disclosure policy depends more on the managers’ incentives to provide informative annual reports than on standards and regulations. The study also represents a first attempt that demonstrates how ownership structure and timely disclosure influence the relationship between disclosure and cost of equity capital.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of individual provisions of firm‐level shareholder rights on the cost of equity capital in the USA setting.

Prior literature has shown that strong shareholder rights, as measured by aggregated shareholder rights indices, could mitigate the agency costs and reduce the cost of equity capital. Stepwise regression method with control variables for financial risks and corporate governance risks is used to empirically test whether individual shareholder rights provisions have varying degrees of impacts on a firm's cost of equity capital.

Of the 24 shareholder rights provisions in the shareholder rights index, four provisions are found to be the most significant determinants of cost of equity capital with the absence of three provisions (poison pill, golden parachute, and control share cash out) and the presence of fair value provision reducing the firm's cost of equity capital.

First, the results suggest that a few individual provisions are major determinants of firm value. Hence, investors and regulators should pay the most attention to these provisions. Second, the result that some provisions that limit shareholders' rights actually reduce cost of equity capital suggests that investors and regulators should not view all aspects of weak shareholder rights negatively.

This paper tests the impact of shareholder rights on cost of equity capital from an individual provision basis.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) add or destroy value from a new perspective by examining the relation of the adoption of ESOP and the company cost of capital.

The capital asset pricing model is used to estimate the company's cost of equity capital, and the cost of debt is estimated using bond yield spreads. The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) is calculated as the weighted percentage of the firm funded by equity, preferred stock, and debt multiplied by the individual costs of capital. Univariate and multivariate analyses are conducted around the event of adoption to determine if the cost of capital changes after the adoption of ESOP.

Results from the univariate analysis show that firms adopting leveraged as well as non‐leveraged ESOP plans experience decreases in costs of equity and debt capital as well as decreases in their WACC. However, the multivariate analysis demonstrates that only the non‐leveraged common ESOPs are negatively correlated to cost of equity, cost of debt, and WACC. Robustness tests confirm that the reduction in the cost of equity capital drives the decline in WACC.

The findings contribute to the cost of capital literature and have implications for firms that decide to engage in ESOP plans. It is found that ESOPs benefit from decreased cost of capital related to the ability to increase debt capacity for the firm as well as the existing tax preferential treatments of ESOP plans.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between social responsibility and equity in China. In the process, the authors utilize data on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports (in particular, information disclosure) and equity capital (focusing on cost). The overarching hypothesis may be phrased simply as: is CSR reporting rewarded by the capital market in China?

The data of 3,012 list corporations in China securities are used and 1,015 CSR report quality scores (Rankins CSR Ratings) are hand-gathered from HEXUN (Web site) and utilized in the process of developing the model; financial and stock market information is obtained from the Wind database and the China Stock Market and Accounting Research database.

The authors’ results suggest that overall the quality of CSR report is strongly, negatively related with the cost of capital: the higher the quality of social responsibility information disclosure, the lower the cost of equity capital. Most intriguingly, the authors find a sharp contrast between the government-owned corporations (state-owned enterprises) and privately owned, listed corporations. The quality of CSR reporting has a much higher impact in lowering the cost of equity capital for privately owned corporations. In contrasting the results for mandatory versus voluntary CSR disclosure, the quality of CSR reporting for the latter does not have any higher impact in lowering the cost of equity.

Good social responsibility behavior by corporations and their subsequent information disclosure has beneficial financial impacts. In the authors’ research, the authors showed its immediate impact to be in the lowering of the overall corporate cost of equity. In this regard, the authors would recommend that chief executive officers pay more attention to CSR practice and its disclosure. Private firms issuing CSR reports will benefit from much lower financing costs through the capital market.

Due to the structure of capital markets in China, the authors are able to show that CSR reporting of privately owned, listed corporations have much more effective signaling power. On the basis of the authors’ empirical findings in relation to the quality of CSR reporting and its impact on cost of capital, the authors suggest there is greater scope for research which takes a “finance and society” perspective. Based on more extensive research, such a perspective may enable scholars to orientate finance and finance research toward a model of “socio-capitalism”.

This paper seeks to examine the association between a firm's extent and precision of customer value disclosure and its implied cost of equity capital. In addition, it aims to investigate whether industry competition intensity attenuates this association.

The content of corporate websites from four continental European countries is analysed on the presence and precision of customer value information and empirically test whether content and precision are associated with the firm's implied cost of equity capital measurement.

The results show a negative association between cross‐sectional differences in the extent of customer value disclosure and cross‐sectional differences in a firm's cost of equity capital. In addition, the precision of the customer value information disclosed affects this association. It is observed that a negative relationship between quantitative (or hard) customer value disclosure and a firm's cost of equity capital, but not for qualitative (or soft) customer value disclosure. As expected, industry competition intensity attenuates the association between quantitative customer value disclosures and a firm's cost of equity capital.

The paper considers web placement of customer value disclosure although a firm might disclose such information through other information channels as well.

A firm tends to benefit economically from more precise customer value disclosure.

The paper extends existing evidence by considering the capital market implications of disclosing customer value information. In addition, it examines whether industry competition affects the association between customer value disclosure and the firm's cost of equity capital.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of adoption of the mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the cost of equity capital in a unique Korean setting. In Korea, individual financial statements were taken as primary financial statements. Before the adoption of IFRS, consolidated financial statements were taken as supplementary financial statements.

The authors measure the cost of equity using the average estimates from the implied cost of capital models proposed by Claus and Thomas (2001), Gebhardt et al. (2001), Easton (2004) and Ohlson and Juettner-Nauroth (2005), using it as the primary dependent variable. Mandatory IFRS adoption, the independent variable in this study, is assigned a value of 1 for the post-adoption period and 0 otherwise.

Using a sample of listed Korean companies during the period from 2000 to 2013, the authors find evidence of a significant reduction in the cost of equity capital in Korean listed companies after mandatory adoption of the IFRS in 2011, after controlling for a set of market variables.

This study is one of a growing body of literature on the relations between mandatory IFRS adoption and the cost of equity capital (Easley and O’Hara 2004; Covrig et al. 2007; Lambert et al. 2007; Daske et al. 2008). According to the results of this study, increased financial disclosure and enhanced information comparability, along with changes in legal and institutional enforcement, seem to have had a joint effect on the cost of equity capital, leading to a large decrease in expected equity returns.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic consequences of different dimensions of accounting conservatism: ex ante (balance sheet or unconditional) conservatism and ex post (earnings or conditional) conservatism. It is argued that the two dimensions of conservatism convey different information to the market about the quality of accounting numbers and have different associations with equity investors' required rates of return.

The cost of equity capital estimates are based on the Ohlson and Juettner‐Nauroth model. The paper applies a regression model to examine the relationship between the cost of equity capital and accounting conservatism controlling for other risk factors.

The findings indicate that ex ante conservatism is associated with higher quality of accounting information and lower costs of equity capital and that ex post conservatism is associated with lower quality of accounting information and higher costs of equity capital.

The firm‐level conservatism measures may suffer from measurement error. Future studies can be more specific in determining proxies for ex ante and ex post conservatism.

The results imply that conservative accounting signals information to investors about the quality of a firm's current and future earnings. Investors' required rates of returns may be higher for conservative reporting firms that are more susceptible to opportunistic management discretion.

The paper provides the first UK evidence on the effect of different dimensions of conservatism on equity investors' required rates of return.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether audit committee characteristics influence the cost of equity capital.

Drawing on signalling theory, this study hypothesises that the presence of an AC with adequate characteristics serves as a market “signal” of the credibility of the effective monitoring process and hence affects the perception of capital providers on the cost of equity capital. The study uses a multiple regression analysis on data collected from a sample of top Australian listed firms.

The study finds that audit committee characteristics such as size, meeting frequency and independence are significantly and negatively associated with the cost of equity capital. However, there is no significant evidence that the financial qualifications of audit committee directors are associated with the cost of equity capital.

While there have been several studies examining the cost of equity capital, there is very limited research on the cost of capital in Australian firms. The study aims to fill this gap, in part, and contribute to the literature on corporate governance and signalling theory.