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PurposeThis study aims to investigate not only the association between corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and the cost of capital (COC) but also its impact on the company’s idiosyncratic risk. Further, it highlights that companies could manage their risk through sustainability initiatives to achieve a cheaper cost of financing.Design/methodology/approachUsing an extensive Australian sample for the 2007–2017 period from the Bloomberg database, this study conducts a panel (data) regression analysis to examine the impact of the corporate ESG performance disclosure score on the COC and idiosyncratic risk. The robustness of the findings is tested and confirmed in several ways, including a sensitivity test. Furthermore, the instrumental variable approach is used to address potential endogeneity issues.FindingsA favourable association was found between a higher corporate ESG performance disclosure score and cheaper resources financing. The evidence also supports the mitigating impact of corporate ESG performance disclosure score on the company’s idiosyncratic risk as a strong complement for access to a cheaper source of funds. The findings strongly support both hypotheses of this study.Research limitations/implicationsThis study extends the current body of knowledge addressing these associations. Further studies should expand the investigation to non-listed or small and medium-sized companies. Additionally, future studies could contribute to the literature by including other moderating variables, such as a country’s cultural environment and diverse economic situations.Originality/valueAn extensive literature review suggests that this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first that simultaneously evaluates the impact of corporate ESG performance disclosure on a company’s COC and idiosyncratic risk.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the environmental practices and implied cost of equity. Using a comprehensive sample of 23,301 firm-year observations from 43 countries, we find that an improvement in environmental practices leads to reduction of the implied cost of equity. Further, the results are stronger in countries where country-level governance is weak. Our results indicate that most of the benefits come from the reduction of emission and unnecessary wastage of resources. Our results remain robust to alternative specifications and endogeneity concerns.

This study examines whether the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) in 2005 reduces the cost of equity capital. Using a sample of 6,456 firm-year observations of 1,084 EU firms during the 1995 to 2006 period, I find evidence that, on average, the IFRS mandate significantly reduces the cost of equity for mandatory adopters by 47 basis points. I also find that this reduction is present only in countries with strong legal enforcement, and that increased disclosure and enhanced information comparability are two mechanisms behind the cost of equity reduction. Taken together, these findings suggest that while mandatory IFRS adoption significantly lowers firms' cost of equity, the effects depend on the strength of the countries' legal enforcement.

Based on Lambert, Leuz, and Verrecchia's (2007) derivation of the cost of equity capital in terms of expected cash flows, we generate a testable hypothesis that relates tax avoidance to a firm's cost of equity capital. Using three broad measures of tax avoidance—book-tax differences, permanent book-tax differences, and long-run cash effective tax rates—to test our hypothesis, we find that the cost of equity is lower for tax-avoiding firms. This effect is stronger for firms with better outside monitoring, firms that likely realize higher marginal benefits from tax savings, and firms with higher information quality. Overall, our results suggest that equity investors generally require a lower expected rate of return due to the positive cash flow effects of corporate tax avoidance.

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 activities in the current year and that initiating firms with superior social responsibility performance enjoy a subsequent reduction in the cost of equity capital. Further, initiating firms with superior social responsibility performance attract dedicated institutional investors and analyst coverage. Moreover, these analysts achieve lower absolute forecast errors and dispersion. Finally, we find that firms exploit the benefit of a lower cost of equity capital associated with the initiation of CSR disclosure. Initiating firms are more likely than non-initiating firms to raise equity capital following the initiations; among firms raising equity capital, initiating firms raise a significantly larger amount than do non-initiating firms.

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower beta and idiosyncratic risk. However, over the last 40 years, lower risk banks have not had lower costs of equity (lower stock returns), consistent with a stock market anomaly previously documented in other samples. A calibration suggests that a binding ten percentage point increase in Tier 1 capital to risk-weighted assets could double banks' risk premia over Treasury bills.

This study examines the relationship between corporate internationalization and the cost of equity capital. We find that international diversification reduces the cost of equity. The diversification benefits are particularly strong during the 2008 financial crisis and for financially constrained firms. We also find that market-specific factors serve as important channels through which the corporate internationalization effects amplify or attenuate. Overall, our study provides support for theories that multinational companies perform valuable diversification functions to investors in a world with segmented and imperfect financial markets.

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a chief executive officer's (CEOs) past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a nonmonotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs' early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without extremely negative consequences lead firms that behave more aggressively, whereas CEOs who witness the extreme downside of disasters behave more conservatively. These patterns manifest across various corporate policies including leverage, cash holdings, and acquisition activity. Ultimately, the link between CEOs' disaster experience and corporate policies has real economic consequences on firm riskiness and cost of capital.

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant effect on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation in corporate ratings due to rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policies, which require that firms' ratings remain at or below the sovereign rating of their country of domicile.

This study examines liquidity and cost of capital effects around voluntary and mandatory IAS/IFRS adoptions. In contrast to prior work, we focus on the firm-level heterogeneity in the economic consequences, recognizing that firms have considerable discretion in how they implement the new standards. Some firms may make very few changes and adopt IAS/IFRS more in name, while for others the change in standards could be part of a strategy to increase their commitment to transparency. To test these predictions, we classify firms into \"label\" and \"serious\" adopters using firm-level changes in reporting incentives, actual reporting behavior, and the external reporting environment around the switch to IAS/IFRS. We analyze whether capital-market effects are different across \"serious\" and \"label\" firms. While on average liquidity and cost of capital often do not change around voluntary IAS/IFRS adoptions, we find considerable heterogeneity: \"Serious\" adoptions are associated with an increase in liquidity and a decline in cost of capital, whereas \"label\" adoptions are not. We obtain similar results when classifying firms around mandatory IFRS adoption. Our findings imply that we have to exercise caution when interpreting capital-market effects around IAS/IFRS adoption as they also reflect changes in reporting incentives or in firms' broader reporting strategies, and not just the standards.