Shareholder Protection and the Cost of Capital
利用美国各州分阶段采用通用需求法这一自然实验，研究发现削弱股东诉讼权利会显著提高企业的隐含资本成本，其机制包括信息质量下降、风险承担增加和内部人侵占加剧。
Do shareholder protection laws affect the corporate cost of capital? To identify the causal impact of shareholder protection laws on firms’ implied cost of capital, we exploit the staggered adoption across 23 US states of universal-demand laws, which place significant obstacles to derivative lawsuits and thus undermine shareholders’ litigation rights. Using a sample of public US firms between 1985 and 2013, we find that weakened litigation rights for shareholders materially increase firms’ implied cost of capital. We further show that the curtailing of shareholders’ rights leads to a deterioration in information quality, increased risk-taking, and more severe insider expropriation, all of which contribute to heightened financing costs. Overall, our findings indicate that weakened litigation rights for shareholders lead them to face greater agency conflicts and higher market risk, which ultimately translates into higher required returns.