We examine a potential benefit associated with the initiation of voluntary disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities: a reduction in firms' cost of equity capital. We find that firms with a high cost of equity capital in the previous year tend to initiate disclosure of CSR...

We examine international differences in the effect of management forecasts (which we use to proxy for voluntary disclosure) on the cost of equity capital (COC) across 31 countries. We find that the issuance of management forecasts is associated with a lower COC worldwide but that the effect of...

In this paper, we examine international differences in the effect of management forecasts (which we use to proxy for voluntary disclosure) on the cost of equity capital (COC) across 31 countries. We find that the issuance of management forecasts is associated with a lower COC worldwide, but the...