Some firms create innovative financial debt and equity products to attract specific investor tastes (i.e., non-monetary preferences unrelated to expected cash flows). Innovations can be costly, but they may also widen a firm's investor base, leading to a reduction in the cost of capital. Prior research is inconclusive about whether tailoring financial products to meet specific investor tastes affects asset pricing, which I posit stems from a lack of consensus on which assets satisfy a particular taste. My research design, however, avoids this ambiguity by testing the relation between asset pricing and an objectively identified investor taste—a taste for Shariah-compliant investments, which is satisfied via Islamic Finance. Using Malaysian data, I estimate price differences between conventional and Shariah-compliant bonds over an eight-year period (2005 to 2013). I find that an investor taste for Shariah-compliant bonds significantly affects bond pricing. These results hold even after controlling for issuer and issuance characteristics, including differences in covenant types, as well as the possibility that price and demand may be simultaneously determined. I also find evidence that investors with a taste for Shariah-compliant bonds have a significantly different demand distribution than investors without this taste, corroborating my assertion that a preference for Shariah-compliant investments is a distinct taste. Overall, my results are consistent with investors taste affecting the cost of capital.

Abstract We examine whether and how language barriers influence a country’s decision to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Our findings reveal that as the distance between a country’s official language and English (i.e., linguistic distance) increases, the likelihood and speed of a country adopting IFRS decrease. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that language barriers impose significant information costs on preparers and users of financial reporting, making IFRS costlier to adopt for countries with severe language barriers. In further analysis, we find that such information costs materialize when these countries eventually adopt IFRS. Specifically, firms in countries with the most severe language barriers experience a worsened post-adoption information environment, as evidenced by increased analyst forecast errors and widened bid-ask spreads. Overall our study suggests that language barriers impede achievement of international accounting harmonization by increasing the costs associated with adopting, understanding, and applying IFRS.

Abstract The IASB asserts that global stakeholder participation in the standard‐setting process is critical for developing and maintaining high‐quality accounting standards. However, the myriad languages used in countries that apply IFRS may impede this participation. We find that the IASB is less likely to receive comment letters from stakeholders in countries with languages that are linguistically distant from English. We also find that comment letters from more linguistically distant stakeholders are less likely to be quoted in IASB staff‐prepared comment letter summaries, suggesting that they have less influence in the redeliberation process. Path analyses show that this result arises from language frictions being associated with reduced writing quality and originality. We also find that language frictions prevent participation in other standard‐setting communication channels. Collectively, language frictions appear to impede the IASB's efforts to equitably obtain and consider valuable global feedback.