7. Conclusion
This study examines whether firms with more transparent earnings enjoy a lower cost of capital. We base our measure of earnings transparency on the explanatory power of the returns-earnings relation, i.e., the extent to which earnings and change in earnings covary contemporaneously with returns. We find that earnings transparency is significantly negatively associated with cost of capital by showing that our earnings transparency measure is negatively related to subsequent excess returns and differences in portfolio mean subsequent returns incremental to the three Fama-French and momentum factors. These findings indicate that earnings transparency captures dimensions of cost of capital that the factors do not. We also find a significant negative relation between our earnings transparency measure and an estimate of expected cost of capital based on the four-factor model.