会计信息披露行为和资本成本中英文外文翻译.doc

外文文献翻译 原文: Accounting Information, Disclosure, and the Cost of Capital In this paper we examine whether and how accounting information about a firm manifests in its cost of capital, despite the forces of diversification. We build a model that is consistent with the Capital Asset Pricing Model and explicitly allows for multiple securities whose cash flows are correlated. We demonstrate that the quality of accounting information can influence the cost of capital, both directly and indirectly. The direct effect occurs because higher quality disclosures affect the firm’s assessed covariances with other firms’ cash flows, which is nondiversifiable. The indirect effect occurs because higher quality disclosures affect a firm’s real decisions, which likely changes the firm’s ratio of the expected future cash flows to the covariance of these cash flows with the sum of all the cash flows in the market. We show that this effect can go in either direction, but also derive conditions under which an increase in information quality leads to an unambiguous decline in the cost of capital. The link between accounting information and the cost of capital of firms is one of the most fundamental 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 nondiversifi