Beyond IFRS: how firms benefit from industry-specific reporting guidance

This dissertation comprises three distinct chapters. The third chapter examines the capital market effects of standardized voluntary disclosure of industry-specific information in an ex-ante strong information environment, which is the European real estate sector. We compute three proxies measuring the degree of firm compliance with the best practice recommendations (BPR) issued by the European Public Real Estate Association (EPRA). Our results show that EPRA NAV and EPRA NNNAV are both relatively and incrementally value relevant. Further, our results show that firms’ increased (decreased) EPRA BPR disclosures are positively (negatively) associated with liquidity and analyst coverage and negatively (positively) associated with cost of capital. Lastly, we find that debt offering plans are positively associated with first-time adoption of EPRA BPR and subsequently the degree of compliance with EPRA BPR. Overall, our results indicate that investors and analysts deem complementary disclosures in accordance with EPRA BPR useful.