会计信息信息披露和资金成本外文翻译.doc

外文文献翻译 原文: Accounting Information,Disclosure, and the Cost of Capital 1. Introduction The link between accounting information and the cost of capital of firms is one of the mostfundamental issues in accounting. Standard setters frequently refer to it. For example, Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC, suggests that “high quality accounting standards reduce capital costs” Levitt [1998, p. 81]. Similarly, Neel Foster, a former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board FASB, claims that “More information always equates to less uncertainty, and people pay more for certainty. In the context of financial information, the end result is that better disclosure results in a lower cost of capital” Foster [2003, p. 1]. While these claims have intuitive appeal, there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the hypothesized link. In particular, it is unclear to what extent accounting information or firm disclosures reduce nondiversifiable risks in economies with multiple securities. Asset pricing models, such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model CAPM, and portfolio theory emphasize the importance of distinguishing between risks that are diversifiable and those that are not. Thus, the challenge for accounting researchers is to demonstrate whether and how firms’ accounting information manifests in their cost of capital, despite the forces of diversification. This paper examines both of these questions. We define the cost of capital as the expected return on a firm’s stock. This definition is consistent with standard asset pricing models in finance e.g., Fama and Miller [1972, p. 303], as well as numerous studies in accounting that use discounted cash flow or abnormal earnings models to infer firms’ cost of capital e.g., Botosan [1997], Gebhardt, Lee, and Swaminathan [2001].1 In our model, we explicitly allow for multiple firms whose cash flows are correlated. In contrast, most analytical models in accounting examine th