فضای مذهبی و هزینه سرمايه صاحبان سهام
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Literature review and hypothesis development
3- Research design
4- Empirical results and analysis
5- Conclusions
References
Abstract
The cost of equity capital (ICC) is a crucial component of investment decisions and corporate performance evaluations. This study explores the effect of a region’s religious atmosphere on ICC and finds that ICC tends to be lower when stronger religious atmosphere is created. We further use the mediation effect method to clarify the specific channel through which religious atmosphere reduces ICC, and find that earnings quality, corporate investment efficiency and corporate social responsibility partially mediate the effect of religious atmosphere on ICC. Moreover, the relationship between religious atmosphere and ICC is more pronounced in firms with stronger external law environments and higher audit quality, indicating that formal institutions and religious tradition complement each other.
Introduction
The impact of formal legal and governmental institutions on the accounting and auditing behavior of listed firms has been a central concern of capital market accounting research. Recently, more and more researchers have begun to emphasize the importance of informal institutional arrangements and their effect on economic growth (North, 1990; Williamson, 2000; Allen et al., 2005). Informal institutional arrangements are the norms or unconsciously accepted standards that are rooted in a culture; they include, but are not restricted to, ethics, values, religions and customs (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004). Relevant literatures have made various elaborations in this fields. Lacker (2013) and Chen (2015) find that social networks can relieve financial constraints and increase investment and management efficiency. Bunkanwanicha et al. (2013) and Xu et al. (2015) note that marriages and divorces have a great impact on the stock prices and returns of family firms. Gul et al. (2011) and Li and Liu (2012) find that gender diversified boards of directors can drive up investment efficiency and the informativeness of stock prices and reduce the risk of stock price crashes. As an important part of human culture, religion has also attracted researchers’ attention. With the development of religious economic theory and research paradigms, the study of religious culture has become an emerging field in corporate governance at home and abroad (Hilary and Hui, 2009; Dyreng et al., 2012; McGuire et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2013; Du, 2013; Du et al., 2014a, 2014b). The geographical proximity of religious structures is usually used to measure the strength of religious influence (Malloy, 2005; Betler, 2008; Chen, 2013; Du, 2013). Chen et al. (2013) and Du (2013) use the number of Buddhist and Taoist temples within a given radius of a Chinese listed firm as a proxy for the intensity of the religious atmosphere. Using this proxy and quasi-firm-level religious data of Chinese firms from the 2007–2014 period, we focus on the impact of religious atmosphere on a firm’s cost of equity capital. We find that listed firms located in areas with stronger religious atmosphere enjoy a lower cost of equity capital. In order to further clarify the channel how religious atmosphere reduces the cost of equity capital, based on mediation effect method (Wen, 2004), we prove that religious atmosphere reduces the cost of listed firms’ equity capital by improving the quality of accounting information and investment efficiency and by increasing the performance of corporate social responsibility. Moreover, the negative impact of religious atmosphere on listed firms’ cost of equity capital is more pronounced in firms with more stringent external legal environments and higher auditing quality, which suggests that there is a complementary relationship between the internal and external formal institutional arrangements of a firm (referred to as formal institutions) and religious tradition (referred to informal institutions).