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We first analyze legal provisions relating to corporate transparency in Germany. We show that despite the new securities trading law (WpHG) of 1995, the practical efficacy of disclosure regulation is very low. On the one hand, the formation of business groups involving less regulated legal forms as intermediate layers can substantially reduce transparency. On the other hand, the implementation of the law is not practical and not very effective. We illustrate these arguments using several examples of WpHG filings. To illustrate the importance of transparency, we show next that German capital markets are dominated by few large firms accounting for most of the market’s capitalization and trading volume. Moreover, the concentration of control is very high. First, 85% of all officially listed AGs have a dominant shareholder (controlling more than 25% of the voting rights). Second, few large blockholders control several deciding voting blocks in listed corporations, while the majority controls only one block.
Economic theory suggests that a commitment by a firm to increased levels of disclosure should lower the information asymmetry component of the firm’s cost of capital. But whi le the theory is compelling, so far empirical results relating increased levels of disclosure to measurable economic benefits have been mixed. One explanation for the mixed results among studies using data from firms publicly registered in the US is that, under current US reporting standards, the disclosure environment is already rich. In this paper, we study German firms that have switched from the German to an international reporting regime (IAS or US -GAAP), thereby committing themselves to increased le vels of disclosure. We show that proxies for the information asymmetry component of the cost of capital for the switching firms, namely the bid-ask spread and trading volume, behave in the predicted direction compared to firms employing the German reporti ng regime.
This paper studies the incentives of German firms to voluntarily disclose cash flow statements over time. While cash flow statement are mandated under many GAAP regimes, its disclosure has not been mandatory in Germany until recently. Nevertheless, an increasing number of firms provides cash flow statements voluntarily. These firms are likely to be influenced by recommendations of the German accounting profession, IAS 7 as well as the respective standards of other countries. The idea of the paper is to study this influence by looking at the adoption pattern over time and the format of the cash flow statement. It documents the development of voluntary cash flow statement disclosures by German firms with respect to ”milestones” in the evolution of German professional recommendations and respective international standards. The cross-sectional determinants of voluntary and international cash flow statements are analyzed using probit regressions and factor analysis. The results are generally consistent with the idea that capital-market forces drive voluntary cash flow statements that are in line with international reporting practice.