In recent years, the exploration of the quantifiable effects of market-based intangible assets on firm performance has become increasingly important in marketing and management literature. Corporate reputation, considered as a one of the key marketing metrics for maintaining and enhancing companies’ competitiveness in the globalized economy, plays an essential part in this context. Numerous studies show the impact of reputation on measures of financial performance, justifying companies’ endeavors to install and dedicate effort towards systematic reputation management and tracking. A possible consequence of a good reputation that has so far been neglected in academic research is a decrease in a company’s cost of equity capital, a measure that constitutes an important basis for the decision to invest in future projects, thus playing a vital part in the creation and preservation of strategic competitive advantages. A firm’s cost of equity is defined as the required rate of return, given the market’s perception of the firm’s riskiness. It is based on investors’ expectations about future returns and estimated by means of residual income models with varying assumptions and restrictions (in this study: Claus and Thomas 200, Gebhardt et al. 2001, Ohlson and Juettner-Nauroth 2005, and Easton 2004), equating the current stock price to future cash flows that are discounted with the firm’s implied cost of equity. To account for industry-specific idiosyncrasies, each firm’s cost of equity is adjusted by the monthly industry median. Corporate reputation is defined as an attitudinal mindset towards a company. Following the model of Schwaiger (2004), it is conceptualized as a two-dimensional construct comprising a cognitive (competence) and an affective (likeability) component; reputation is the linear combination of these two dimensions. Corporate reputation data was collected in 13 semi-annual waves from large-scale samples representing the general public in Germany. By applying panel data analysis on a set of the 30 largest publicly listed German companies during a seven-year time-span (2005-2011) and controlling for commonly known factors, I show that corporate reputation significantly reduces a firm’s cost of equity. This relationship holds when reputation is corrected for prior financial performance and industry affiliation. My results should help managers to further strengthen their argument that reputation management is value-relevant. This study should be seen as a starting point for further research to gain a deeper understanding of the reputation-cost of capital-interface.

This study extends research into whether disclosure of corporate and financial information is associated with firms’ costs of equity capital. This study sets out to examine empirically the determinants of corporate disclosure in the annual reports of 37 largest and most liquid firms listed on Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE) in Kazakhstan. It also reports the results of the association between company-specific characteristics and disclosure of the sample companies. Based on the analysis of existing empirical research, the disclosure index has been constructed and regression analysis of the influence of the disclosure index on the cost of equity capital has been conducted. The obtained results show that the received findings correlate with foreign empirical studies, and the disclosure index in this sample has a negative impact on the cost of equity capital. Using cost of equity capital estimates derived from capital asset pricing model, we find that firms with higher levels of financial transparency are associated with significantly lower costs of equity capital. Economic theory assumes that by increasing the level of corporate reporting, firms not only increase their stock market liquidity, but also decrease the investors’ estimation risk, arising from uncertainty about future returns and payout distributions. The results show that firms on the Kazakhstan market can reduce their cost of equity capital by increasing the level of their voluntary corporate disclosures.