أثر جودة الأرباح المحاسبية في تكلفة حقوق الملكية طبقًا لمعايير الإبلاغ المالي الدولية

This study has been conducted in response to several accounting efforts aiming at exploring the importance of accounting information quality and its economic consequences. Also, the study aims at examining the effect of earnings quality on the cost of equity for a sample of industrial and service companies listed in the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE). It is hypothesized that earnings quality reduces the cost of equity through reducing the information risk. The sample consists of (78) companies, (51) of which belong to the industrial sector and (27) belong to the service sector during the period (1993-2007). Through using qualitative characteristics of accounting information specified in the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), we have examined the effect of earnings attributes on the cost of equity using 422 observations along with 886 observations for measuring the earnings attributes. The results of the study show that, in general, earnings quality affects the cost of equity and that earnings attributes have individually an effect on the cost of equity. However, the effect of the earnings relevance dimension on the cost of equity is higher than that of the earnings reliability dimension. Further, the resuls show that the effect of earnings conservatism is very low on the cost of equity. Finally, the effect of the accounting-based earnings attributes is higher than the effect of the market-based earnings attributes on the cost of equity. KEYWORDS: Quality of Accounting Earnings, Qualitative Characteristics of Accounting Information, Cost of Capital, Cost of Equity, International Financial Reporting Standards.