This paper investigates the economic consequences of adoption of IFRS for reporting by New Zealand listed companies as indicated by the effect on the cost of equity capital. We analyse a sample of 290 firm year observations on New Zealand listed companies over the periods 1998–2002 and 2009–2013. We find that there is a significant negative association between IFRS adoption and the cost of equity capital. These results are robust to several variations in model specification and sample composition. To the extent that higher quality accounting standards reduce the cost of equity capital, the result suggests that IFRS is a higher quality set of accounting standards than pre IFRS New Zealand GAAP. This is the first study to provide empirical evidence on the impact of adoption of IFRS on the cost of equity capital of New Zealand companies. The evidence supports the findings for European companies and thus points to the benefits potentially available to companies in countries that have yet to adopt IFRS, such as US and Japan.