Abstract: Taking China’s A-share listed companies during 2007-2014 as research samples, this paper employs C-Score model to measure the corporate accounting conservatism, so as to examine the impact of accounting conservatism on the debt capital costs. The results show that the accounting conservatism is positively correlated with the debt capital costs, which is a new type of relationship not conforming to the existing academic literatures. It further investigates the impact of the institutional investors with different natures on the relationship between accounting conservatism and debt capital costs. The results indicate that the stable institutional investors can intensify the positive correlation between accounting conservatism and corporate debt capital costs.

Key words: debt capital cost; institutional investors; heterogeneity; accounting conservatism