This study examines the relation between province-level financial development and the cost of equity in China. Our main findings are that (1) stock market development reduces the cost of equity in general, but the effect diminishes significantly in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and firms with...

The cost of equity capital (ICC) is a crucial component of investment decisions and corporate performance evaluations. This study explores the effect of a region's religious atmosphere on ICC and finds that ICC tends to be lower when stronger religious atmosphere is created. We further use the...

China's slowing economic growth and rapid urbanization have made local government debt financing a significant issue. This study uses a sample of China’s provincial government data for the 2006–2012 period to examine the effect of the disclosure of financial information by local governments...

In this paper, we investigate whether material asset reorganizations (MARs), a special form of merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions, can affect the acquirers' cost of debt financing. Further, we examine the effect of acquiring firms' accounting information quality on the cost of debt and on...