Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 5.5, University of Zurich (Department of Banking and Finance), course: Economics and Finance, language: English, abstract: Does voluntary disclosure quality pay off? And if so, what are the driving forces behind the relationship of voluntary disclosure quality and the cost of equity capital? This study addresses these and other questions in the context of analyzing the determinants of the cost of equity capital for Swiss firms. The relation between voluntary disclosure quality and cost of equity capital is widely known to be affected by self-selection. Potential endogeneity bias is controlled for by adopting a two-stage least squares approach in a cross-sectional setting. Voluntary disclosure quality is proxied by the annual reports disclosure scores for a well-diversified sample of Swiss firms as developed by the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich. Further, an ex-ante cost of capital metric derived from the dividend discount model is used in this study. Empirical evidence shows that the association between voluntary disclosure quality and cost of equity differs with a firm's stock listing history. While the relation is predicted to be negative for firms at the IPO stage, it is likely reversed at some point in a firm's stock listing history. These results suggest that analysts' information processing activities negatively moderate the impact of voluntary disclosure quality on firm value. Importantly, the predicted interaction between voluntary disclosure quality and stock listing history remains significant when adjusting for endogeneity.

This dissertation contributes to the academic literature by examining two issues in relation to corporate Internet disclosure. First, we make a detailed content analysis of the investor relation section on the Web sites of US companies to gain insight into the type and amount of information provided to investors on corporate Web sites and to establish a measure of the Internet disclosure level. We find that companies are not exploiting the full potential of this disclosure medium. In a second study, we examine the relation between the cost of equity capital and the disclosure level of information in the investor relation section of corporate Web sites. We regress the cost of equity capital, obtained from a comprehensive discounted cash flow model, on the disclosure measure from the content analysis study to examine the relationship between these two variables. For a cross-sectional sample of 141 non-financial US companies, we find a negative and highly significant association between the cost of equity capital and level of Internet investor relation disclosure. The results remain significant after controlling for potentially influential variables such as different risk characteristics and firm size. The results indicate thus that Internet disclosure is useful to investors.

This dissertation, "The Effect of Earnings Quality on the Association Between Information Precision and the Cost of Equity Capital" by Jia, Zhu, 朱佳, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled The Effect of Earnings Quality on the Association between Information Precision and the Cost of Equity Capital Submitted by Zhu Jia For the Degree of Master of Philosophy At the University of Hong Kong In March 2007 Abstract A growing volume of literature on the association between information and the cost of equity capital has investigated various firm-specific factors that may affect the relationship between public disclosure and the cost of equity capital. My empirical study adds to this literature by showing that the earnings quality of firms might also play a determining role in the association between public information precision and the cost of equity capital. The earnings quality indicator in this study is used to proxy the value-relevance of public disclosure and is included as a control variable in the regression of the cost of equity capital estimates on the information precision. I document that public information is in general negatively associated with the cost of equity capital. However, when the earnings quality of firms is deteriorating to certain extent, the cost of equity capital goes up in response to more precise public information. Moreover, I find that the public and private information precisions act as complements. On the other hand, I do not find an unambiguous association between private information precision and the cost of equity capital, nor any reliable evidence about the direct impact of the earnings quality indicator on the cost of equity capital. (No. of words: 201) DOI: 10.5353/th_b3879143 Subjects: Corporate profits Disclosure of information Capital costs

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.

This paper examines the association between expected cost of equity capital and three types of disclosure (annual report, quarterly and other published reports, and investor relations). Our sample consists of 3,620 firm-year observations with Value Line data, which are also included in the AIMR's Annual Reviews of Corporate Reporting Practices dated from 1985/1986 through 1995/1996. The disclosure rankings produced by the AIMR are employed to proxy for disclosure level. Four alternative estimates of expected cost of equity capital estimates are examined. However, we conclude that two of these approaches, that employed in Botosan (1997) and an approach based on a finite horizon specification of the Gordon growth model, dominate the other two.As expected, we find that cost of equity capital is decreasing in annual report disclosure level. The magnitude of the difference in cost of equity capital between the most and least forthcoming firms is approximately one-half to one percentage point, after controlling for market beta and firm size. Contrary to our expectations, we find a positive association between cost of equity capital and the level of more timely disclosures, such as the quarterly report. The magnitude of the difference in cost of equity capital between the most and least forthcoming firms is approximately one to two percentage points, after controlling for market beta and firm size. This result, while contrary to that predicted by theory, is consistent with managers' claims that greater timely disclosures increase cost of equity capital, possibly through increased stock price volatility. Finally, we find no association between cost of equity capital and the level of investor relations activities.These results confirm and extend the results of Botosan (1997) to include larger, more heavily followed firms, across a diverse group of industries, over a number of years. In addition, they suggest that aggregating across different types of disclosure results in a loss of information and potentially erroneous conclusions.

This paper examines the direct effect of internal control quality (ICQ) on cost of equity capital and whether the former has a moderating effect on the association between voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital in an emerging market (Egypt). ICQ is measured using a survey of external auditors. A content analysis approach is used to proxy for the level of voluntary disclosure in annual. Finally, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework is used to estimate cost of equity capital. Based on a sample of 256 firm-year observations over the period of 2007-2010, we find that ICQ is negatively and significantly associated with cost of equity capital indicating that better controls reduce cost of capital. In addition, ICQ moderates the association between voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital since this association is only negative and significant for companies characterized by high ICQ. Our study contributes to the internal control literature by focusing on an emergent unregulated market with respect to internal control disclosure and documents that ICQ plays an important role in reducing cost of equity capital (either directly or indirectly) by increasing the value relevance of voluntary disclosure among investors on the Egyptian stock exchange.