The aim of this paper is to examine the potentialeffects of trust in financial reporting on the costof debt of a wide sample of Spanish firms, corresponding to the period 1996-2002. To do so,we analyse whether auditor reputation has a significantimpact on the way investors use accruals fordecision-making. Particularly, an empirical analysisis carried out to test whether the pricing ofaccruals quality depends on auditor reputation.

Ourresults show that the inverse relationship betweenaccruals quality and cost of debt reported by Franciset al. (2005) only holds when the auditor belongsto a Big 4. When the auditors are national majors orlocal audit firms an increase of accruals quality doesnot lead to a significant decrease of the costof debt.