Yoon et al.
examine whether extensible Business Reporting Language adoption reduces information asymmetry in a stock market context.
Hodge et al.
show that extensible Business Reporting Language increases market transparency.
We contribute to the second line of literature.
We are not able to control for the selection bias of participating companies, but rather characterize the overall effect on the participating company with respect to their cost of capital and the number of analysts following.
Additionally, we further analyze different groups of participants to detect the groups benefitting most from the early adoption.
From the very different motives of voluntary filing program participation , we assume different motives for companies of different industry groups and of different degrees of innovation, for example Information Technology companies compared to Utilities companies.
Specifically, Information Technology companies and financial service companies seem to have stronger incentives to participate in the voluntary filing program in order to acquire knowledge on extensible Business Reporting Language in advance and to have the know-how to offer and consult their clients.