The World Price of Earnings Opacity
分析1984-1998年34个国家的财务报表，构建衡量盈利不透明度的三个维度（盈利激进性、亏损规避和盈利平滑），发现整体盈利不透明度上升会显著增加该国股权成本并减少股票市场交易量。
We analyze financial statements from 34 countries for the period 1984–1998 to construct a panel data set measuring three dimensions of reported accounting earnings for each country: earnings aggressiveness, loss avoidance, and earnings smoothing. We hypothesize that these three dimensions are associated with uninformative or opaque earnings, and so we combine these three measures to obtain an overall earnings opacity time-series measure per country. We then explore whether our three measures of earnings opacity affect two characteristics of an equity market in a country: the return the shareholders demand and how much they trade. While not all results are consistent for our three individual earnings opacity measures, our panel data tests document that, after controlling for other influences, an increase in overall earnings opacity in a country is linked to an economically significant increase in the cost of equity and an economically significant decrease in trading in the stock market of that country.