Intellectual Capital Risk: The link between intellectual capital, voluntary disclosure, and cost of equity capital

In recent years, companies have undergone a process of change. No longer is it sufficient to report mandatory data to the capital markets, and companies are at risk of not realising value if they don't provide additional information; this holds true in particular for information on their Intellectual Capital (IC). Investors are likely to invest in a company that attempts to decrease the information asymmetry; this might turn into a benefit for the company by lowering the risk premium to be paid to investors. This book attempts to answer the question whether this assumed negative relation between disclosure level and cost of equity capital/risk premium can be confirmed in different temporal settings, namely for historical and forward-oriented information