Financial Disclosure and Entry to the European Capital Market

In this paper, I provide some evidence concerning the relationship between financial information and a firm's entry into a capital market. The main assumption underlying this study is that corporations will be motivated to upgrade their financial disclosure in order to obtain scarce money capital as cheaply as possible.' To assess the relationship between disclosure and capital market entry, I selected the entry of an enterprise-investor into an international new issues market. My reason for this choice was simply that a firm would be expected to make its security issues relatively appealing during entry in order to attract support from an audience which possesses alternative outlets for their savings.2 The demand for information would appear to be even stronger in an international setting where investors are often unacquainted with the relative merits of foreign borrowers.3 The effect of