momentum factors reflect common information. However, the expected cost of capital finding obtains regardless of whether the fundamental risk characteristics underlying the factors are included in the estimating equation. This finding indicates that earnings transparency reflects information associated with expected cost of capital incremental to that reflected in these characteristics. Findings from all tests are robust to inclusion of explicit controls for leverage, growth, and the magnitude of the earnings response coefficient in the returns-earnings relation. In addition, findings relating to subsequent excess and portfolio mean returns are robust to inclusion of controls for changes in cash flow and cash flow risk, and findings relating to expected cost of capital are robust to using a measure of expected cost of capital implied by analysts’ earnings forecasts. Collectively, these findings are consistent with greater earnings transparency being associated with lower cost of capital. Using a relevance measure bearing some resemblance to our earnings transparency measure, Francis et al. (2004) reports evidence of negative relations between its measure and subsequent returns and a proxy for expected cost of capital. Although Francis et al. (2004) and we have similar predictions regarding the negative association between relevance/earnings transparency and cost of capital, the tests in Francis et al. (2004) do not support that study’s inferences. The reported t-statistics in Francis et al. (2004) are biased upwards because the statistics do not take into account correlation of regression residuals. We show that after taking into account such correlation, there is no significant relation between the Francis et al. (2004) measure and cost of capital. A key distinction between our study and Francis et al. (2004) is that we develop an earnings transparency measure that is based only on current information, which likely accounts for our ability to find a significant relation between earnings transparency and cost of capital. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the basis of our prediction and related research. Section 3 explains why earnings transparency varies across firms and over time. Section 4 develops the research design, Section 5 describes the sample, and Section 6 presents our results. Section 7 concludes the study.
2. Basis for prediction and related research