Cross-Sectional Determinants of Information Quality Proxies and Cost of Capital Measures

This paper examines the source of the documented empirical link between measures of “accruals quality” and a firm’s cost of capital. First, we argue that when regressions include accruals quality and operating volatility as determinants, these highly correlated measures capture different underlying constructs. Second, we find that in such regressions, the accruals quality measure displays inconsistent associations, while operating volatility variables display robust associations, with various cost of capital measures. Third, we provide research design suggestions to disentangle the effect of accruals quality from operating volatility, and we show how this method leads to less noisy coefficient estimates. These findings should be useful in designing empirical tests of the hypothesized associations involving accruals quality, operating volatility, and cost of capital.