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The claimed association between the issuance of sustainability reports and the cost of equity capital does not hold for Korean listed companies. We propose two potential explanations for the muted association. First, the sustainability reports may not convey value-relevant information. Second, investors may not fully process unstructured sustainability information. We do not find a significant cross-sectional variation across corporate governance quality, rejecting the former. However, we find evidence that the issuance of sustainability reports decreases the cost of equity when supplemented with ESG ratings, supporting the latter. We conclude that ESG ratings facilitate investors processing of sustainability information.

This paper examines a model where investors’ varying information processing abilities influence financial market equilibrium through price informativeness. When prices are sufficiently informative, high-efficiency investors specialize in high-signal-efficiency assets, while low-efficiency investors rely on price information and specialize in low-signal-efficiency assets. Consequently, assets with low signal efficiency exhibit higher risk premiums compared to those with high signal efficiency. This suggests that individuals with lower information processing efficiency may hold more small stocks with less efficient signals, potentially leading to higher risk premiums in small stocks compared to larger ones, driven by information-related factors.

A steady decrease in accounting PhD graduates has led to a shortage of accounting faculty classified as ‘Scholarly Academic’ (SA) according to AACSB standards for accreditation. To increase the supply of qualified accounting faculty, programs like the University of Florida’s Post-Doctoral Bridge Program (PDBP) have evolved to enable faculty to become qualified as Scholarly Academic (SA) per AACSB standards. From 2008 to 2020, the PDBP produced 43 SA qualified graduates from the accounting concentration track of the program. This increase in SA accounting faculty resulted in an average of 3.3 graduates per year, with two-thirds of graduates currently employed in AACSB accredited programs. Results suggest that non-traditional programs like the PDBP are a viable option to help alleviate the shortage of SA accounting faculty faced by academia.