In 2010, Maryland became the first state to allow firms to incorporate as “benefit corporations,” which are for-profit entities with a social purpose. Since then, nineteen other states have followed. Using survey data from the population of 94 benefit corporations existent at the time of the...

This paper investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance by listed companies on the cost of equity capital from the perspectives of enterprise risk management and capital market risk pricing and discusses the mediating effects of operating risk. Using the causal...

The paper examines the relationship between CSR and cost of equity in an in-ternational context assessing the moderating effect of culture on the relation between CSR and the cost of equity. We use an international sample of 42 countries, and company-level data from 2002-2013, to address...

We examine whether CEO extraversion, an important personality trait associated with leadership, affects firms' expected cost of equity capital. We measure CEO extraversion using CEOs' speech patterns during the unscripted portion of conference calls. After controlling for several CEO and firm...

We examine the effects of organization capital — evident in management quality practices — on firms' implied cost of equity. We show that superior management practices decrease firms' cost of equity capital. This novel finding, robust to a battery of sensitivity analyses and to endogeneity...

The transition from high- to lower-carbon production systems increasingly creates regulatory and market risks for high-emitting firms. We test to which extent financial investors demand a premium to compensate for such risks and thus might raise firms' cost of equity capital (CoE). Using data...