This study examines how mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in European countries affects banks’ cost of equity. Supporters of IFRS argue that its adoption improves the quality of accounting information, which in turn decreases the cost of equity. However, banking regulators could intervene in the implementation of new accounting standards to protect the stability of the banking system, which would deteriorate banks’ information environment and thereby increase the cost of equity. Using a regression analysis of European listed bank data, I find that banks’ cost of equity increases after the adoption of IFRS in countries with strong bank supervisory offices. I also find that strong legal enforcement and additional disclosure requirements jointly reduce banks’ cost of equity, but pre-IFRS inconsistencies between local accounting standards and regulatory standards jointly increase banks’ cost of equity. This study contributes to the literature on market discipline in banking and has policy implications: The findings suggest that, when implementing new accounting standards, potential conflicts between financial reporting and banking regulations should be considered.
This study reexamines the test on the pricing of accruals quality. Theory suggests that information risk is a priced risk factor. Using accruals quality as the proxy for information risk, researchers have tested the pricing of information risk. The results are inconsistent potentially because of the information shock in the realized returns that are used as the proxy for expected returns. Based on this argument, this study revisits this issue excluding information-shock-free measure of expected returns. Research design, data and methodology: This study estimates expected returns using the vector autoregression model. This method extracts information shocks more thoroughly than the methods in prior studies; therefore, the concern regarding information shock is minimized. As risk premiums are larger in recession periods than in expansion periods, recession and expansion subsamples were used to confirm the robustness of the main findings. For the pricing test, this study uses twostage cross-sectional regression. Results: Empirical results find evidence that accruals quality is a priced risk factor. Furthermore, this study finds that the pricing of accruals quality is observed only in recession periods. Conclusions: This study supports the argument that accruals quality, as well as the pricing of information risk, is a priced risk factor.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.