Using the Million Dollar List dataset containing major corporate philanthropic gifts, we examine whether corporate philanthropy is associated with a firm's cost of equity capital. On one hand, philanthropy is an allocation of shareholder returns to a third party with uncertain returns, thereby...

We seek evidence of a link between accruals-based earnings quality (EQ) and cost of capital by examining two classes of shares traded in China's segregated markets during 1995-2000. The A- and B-shares introduced respectively for domestic and foreign investors carry identical cash flow rights,...

In this paper, I examine the impact of market inefficiency on the properties of implied cost of capital (ICC) estimates. I show that market inefficiency will bias the relation between the ICC estimate and future returns upwards. Utilizing recently developed ICC estimates formed using regression...

Employing a basic model of an economy comprising both the real and financial sectors, I show that the primitive risk measure for real investment decisions is earnings beta — defined as the (normalized) covariance between firm profitability (return on investment) and the aggregate profitability...

As the proxy for expected return, the implied cost of capital (ICC) is subject to a mispricing-driven measurement error because the price of a stock used to compute ICC can deviate from its intrinsic value. For undervalued stocks, the mispricing-driven measurement error is positive and increases...

Because stock price generally deviates from the intrinsic value, stock price is a noisy indicator of the intrinsic value. As an expected return proxy, the implied cost of capital (ICC)—the internal rate of return that equates the noisy stock price to discounted expected future dividends—thus...

This study provides international evidence that external financing dependence creates incentives for firms to undertake a higher level of voluntary accounting disclosure. For a sample of 856 observations from 34 countries and 18 different manufacturing industry sectors, we document that firms in...

Improved disclosure increases prices and liquidity in a laboratory financial market, and does so more strongly when investors face the risk of unpredictable demand shocks. These results are consistent with a broad class of theoretical and empirical studies. Disclosure has larger effects on...

The interrelationships between cash flows, corresponding discount rates and values follow certain rules, knowing which one can quite easily and correctly find out value of given cash flow using the discounting-by-components framework, or to find the correct formulation of the discount rate for...

An important aim of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was to reduce cost of capital by enhancing auditor independence. However, prior literature has argued that SOX has been ineffective in meeting this objective. We contribute to this debate by first providing evidence suggesting that auditor...