Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2023

DOI

10.3390/jrfm16080358

Publication Title

Journal of Risk and Financial Management

Volume

16

Issue

8

Pages

358 (1-18 pp.)

Abstract

While disclosing financial information has been widely proved to reduce the financing cost of a company, the impact of non-financial information, such as sustainability information, disclosing on the financing cost of the company is still in debate. The goal of this paper is to explore the impact of disclosing sustainability-related information on the cost of equity for firms. The paper first introduces the concept of sustainability information disclosure, and then exhibits its benefit through exploring its impact on reducing a firm’s financing cost. It uses the Gartner supply chain top 50 rankings to construct the experiment environment to test for the effect of sustainability information disclosure on the cost of equity capital. The study uses the Gartner top 50 supply chain rankings from 2013 to 2017 to construct the experiment environment, and test for the sustainability information disclosure’s impact on reducing the cost of equity capital. The regressions, which are based on the 350 firm-year sample of the United States and the 604 global firm-year sample, indicate that sustainability information disclosure significantly reduced the cost of equity capital. This paper uses a fixed effect regression method to analyze the impact of sustainability information disclosure. According to the regression result, the sustainability information disclosure variable has a significant negative coefficient. The result is robust under many settings. Thus, the paper finds that sustainability information disclosure significantly diminishes the cost of equity capital, controlling for ESG information disclosure. It also discusses the implications of the findings and future research directions for sustainability information disclosure.

Rights

Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Comments

Data Availability Statement:

This study uses data from both subscribed and public databases. The subscribed databases are from Bloomberg ESG databases and Bloomberg financial databases. The public databases are from Gartner website (https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-gartner-supply-chain-top-25-for-2022, accessed on 23 July 2023).

ORCID

0000-0003-2695-9642 (Zheng)

Original Publication Citation

Li, L., Zheng, X., & Wang, S. (2023). The effect of sustainability information Disclosure on the cost of equity capital: An empirical analysis based on Gartner top 50 supply chain rankings. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 16(8), Article 358. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm16080358

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