We exploit the introduction of Regulation G (RegG) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2003 to study the association between non-GAAP earnings disclosure and debt market outcomes. Specifically, we focus on a subset of 199 S&P 500 firms to analyse the association between non-GAAP earnings disclosure and long-term issuer credit ratings as well as bond spreads before and after the regulatory intervention. We find that post-RegG, correlation between non-GAAP earnings disclosure and bond spreads changes from positive to negative but do not document any change in its correlation with respect to credit ratings. Our study provides first evidence that post-RegG, bond investors, but not rating agencies, seem to view non-GAAP earnings disclosure favourably as part of their credit risk assessment. In practical terms, our results document a specific benefit of RegG and may inform the SEC that its goal of more accurate security pricing extends to the bond markets, which is an under-researched area in the context of non-GAAP regulation.

我们利用美国证券交易委员会 (SEC) 于 2003 年推出的 G 条例 (RegG) 来研究非 GAAP 收益披露与债务市场结果之间的关联。具体来说，我们重点关注 199 家标准普尔 500 强公司的子集，分析非 GAAP 收益披露与长期发行人信用评级以及监管干预前后的债券利差之间的关联。我们发现，监管后，非公认会计原则收益披露与债券利差之间的相关性从正变为负，但没有记录其与信用评级的相关性的任何变化。我们的研究提供了第一个证据，表明在监管监管之后，债券投资者（而非评级机构）似乎认为非公认会计原则收益披露是其信用风险评估的一部分。实际上，我们的结果记录了 RegG 的具体优势，并可能告知 SEC，其更准确的证券定价目标延伸到了债券市场，这是非 GAAP 监管背景下研究不足的领域。