Compliance with pension-related mandatory disclosures and debt financing

Using hand‐collected data on the level of pension‐related mandatory disclosures required by International Accounting Standard 19 Employee Benefits , we test whether compliance levels with these disclosures convey information that affects firms’ access to the public instead of the private debt market, as well as the cost of their new debt issues. We document a higher tendency to access the public debt market for firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure. Furthermore, we find that firms with higher levels of pension‐related disclosure enjoy a lower cost in terms of issuance of public debt, but not a lower cost for private debt issues. Thus, the benefits of disclosure in reducing information risk are only realisable when creditors rely heavily on financial statements in their decision making, due to the limited access to private information. Additional tests reveal that high compliance levels effectively mitigate the negative effect of pension deficits on the cost of public debt. These findings provide novel evidence in the extant literature on the role of mandatory (and, in particular, pension‐related) disclosures on firms’ debt financing. They also have important policy implications

ECATS - Mission of Association for an environmentally compatible air transport system

After 5 years of operation and collaboration the ECATS Network of Excellence (NoE) will now transform itself into a registered Association of European Research Establishments and Universities leading in the field of aeronautics and the environment. The transition from NoE to the Association will take place during 2010 and 2011. This future ECATS Association has the vision to support endeavours to make aviation more sustainable focussing on scientific expertise and exchange of information. ECATS’ Virtual Fuel Centre focusses on alternative fuel characterisation allowing operating a premix burner, measuring flame velocities, expanding kinetic schemes and spray characterisation. ECATS’ Airport Air Quality (AAQ) focus area povides an assessment of this highly interdisciplinary research field, and develops improved characterisation and approximation specifications for aviation particulate matter emissions. ECATS’ third focus area is dealing with global impact of aviation and green flight. Close collaboration is exploited in order to provide updated estimates and synergies with other programmes established. The future ECATS Association provides an efficient framework for collaboration between universities and research establishments and helps making aviation more sustainable