Purpose: 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,...

We employ more than 20 measures of Irresponsible Environmental, Social and Governance (IESG) / Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) to examine whether lending institutions penalise firms for engaging in socially and environmentally irresponsible activities by increasing the cost of borrowing....