Publications
Publications
- September 2011
- Journal of Accounting Research
Information Risk and Fair Value: An Examination of Equity Betas
By: Edward J. Riedl and George Serafeim
Abstract
Using a sample of U.S. financial institutions, we exploit recent mandatory disclosures of financial instruments designated as fair value level 1, 2, and 3 to test whether greater information risk in financial instrument fair values leads to higher cost of capital. We derive an empirical model allowing asset-specific estimates of implied betas and find evidence that firms with greater exposure to level 3 financial assets exhibit higher betas relative to those designated as level 1 or level 2. We further find that this difference in implied betas across fair value designations is more pronounced for firms with ex ante lower-quality information environments: firms with lower analyst following, lower market capitalization, higher analyst forecast errors, or higher analyst forecast dispersion. Overall, the results are consistent with a higher cost of capital for more opaque financial assets, but also suggest that differences in firms' information environments can mitigate information risk across the fair value designations.
Keywords
Forecasting and Prediction; Assets; Cost of Capital; Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Corporate Disclosure; Information; Risk and Uncertainty; Value; United States
Citation
Riedl, Edward J., and George Serafeim. "Information Risk and Fair Value: An Examination of Equity Betas." Journal of Accounting Research 49, no. 4 (September 2011): 1083–1122.
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