The Impact of Accounting Restatements on a Firm’s Cost of Public Debt

This study extends the growing literature (e.g., Kinney and McDaniel (1989), Richardson et al. (2002), Palmrose et al. (2004), Desai et al. (2006)) on restatements of financial statements of companies due to non-GAAP reporting.2 This paper examines the influence of announcing an accounting restatement of previously filed financial statements on a firm’s cost of public debt, while prior event study literature on restatements (e.g., Kinney and McDaniel (1989), Anderson and Yohn (2002), and Palmrose, Richardson, and Scholz (2004)) pays attention to stock holders’ reactions after the restatement announcement.