Participation in setting technology standards and the implied cost of equity
研究发现参与标准制定组织（SSO）的美国上市公司，其隐含权益资本成本显著更低，这种效应在技术不确定性、产品市场不确定性和信息不对称高的企业中尤为明显。
This study empirically investigates the financial market's reaction to firms’ participation in standard setting organizations (SSOs) in terms of firms’ implied cost of equity capital – the discount rate applied by investors to a firm's expected future cash flows. Our analysis utilizes a panel of 3350 US public firms and their membership of 183 SSOs operating in a range of technology domains between 1996 and 2014. It shows a significantly lower cost of equity for SSO participants. We then empirically document a causal link between SSO membership and a firm's cost of equity, by exploiting exogenous variations in membership count linked to SSO closures and an instrumental variable measuring SSO availability. Our results underscore the important role of SSO membership in mitigating the perceived riskiness of a firm, particularly when it faces high degrees of technological uncertainty, product-market uncertainty, and information asymmetry.