自愿性信息披露，收益质量与资本成本外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 Voluntary Disclosure, Earnings Quality, and Costs of Capital Material Source: Internet .Author: Jennifer Francis, Dhananjay Nanda, Per Olsson. We investigate the relation between voluntary disclosure and earnings quality, and the pricing effects of voluntary disclosure unconditionally and conditional on earnings quality. Our proxy for voluntary disclosure is a coded index of financial information from firms’ annual reports and 10-K filings. By earnings quality, we mean the precision of the earnings signal emanating from the firm’s financial reporting system. Such imprecision affects the capital market’s demand for, as well as a firm’s motive to supply, disclosures that are useful to current shareholders and prospective investors in assessing firm value. Our main proxy for a firm’s earnings quality is the common factor identified by factor analysis performed on three measures of earnings quality commonly used in the literature: accruals quality, earnings variability, and the absolute value of abnormal accruals. Analytical research provides conflicting predictions about how earnings quality influences firms’ disclosure decisions. One strand argues that the information asymmetry between firm insiders and shareholders creates a demand for disclosure and provides an incentive for firms to disclose because the value of additional information is greater in these settings (Grossman and Hart, 1980; Milgrom, 1981; Verrecchia, 1983). An implication is that firms with poor (good) earnings quality will issue more (less) expansive disclosures because information asymmetry between the firm and investors is higher (lower) in such firms; we interpret this as a substitutive relation. Another strand shows that as information quality increases (such that the quality of the manager’s information increases) managers have incentives to disclose more (Verrecchia, 1990). Under this view, firms with poor (good) earnings quality will issue less (more) expansive disclosures, becaus