Comparing Corporate Value Discounts of U.S. and Non-U.S. Firms Associated With Lower Transparency

This paper compares the association between transparency and firm value between U.S. and non-U.S. firms. I show that firm value is more sensitive to disclosure quality and corporate governance in global companies than in U.S. companies. I adopt and modify the Disaggregation Index by Chen et al. (2015), a measure of disclosure quality, and apply it towards global companies reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). By showing the differential effects of transparency on firm value, this paper sheds light on an important concern expressed by U.S. investors when investing in in global equities, and aims to partly explain the difference in betas between U.S. and global firms. I hypothesize U.S. equity home bias to be the main driver of the difference in coefficients, but conclude that change in U.S. ownership is not sufficient in explaining the differential effects.