We investigate private borrowers incentives to publicly disclose financial information in loan agreements in anticipation of public equity or debt issuance. Voluntary disclosure of sales and key financial ratios reduces lender hold-up, reduces financing costs and increases public bond and equity...

The SEC regulates and standardizes information production in financial markets through financial reporting standards. With a novel dataset exploiting institutional features of the standard setting process. On average, standards increase aggregate market value by 0.93%, although discord among...

When lenders gain control rights in technical default, they influence corporate operating decisions. We develop a novel measure of operational risk-taking that utilizes industry-specific data on corporate operations. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that borrowers reduce...

I identify the effects of personal relationships on loan contracting using executive deaths and retirements at other firms as a source of exogenous variation in executive turnover. After plausibly-exogenous turnover, borrowers choose lenders with which their new executive's have personal...

We use a regression discontinuity design to study ex-post discretion in lender's contractual enforcement of restrictive covenant violations. At pre-set thresholds, we find that lenders enforce contractual breaches at an 11% rate, varying between 5% and 18% and peaking when credit conditions are...

We examine the effect of political uncertainty on corporate transparency and market quality using gubernatorial elections as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in uncertainty. Despite real activity falling in the years leading up to a close election, voluntary disclosure, measured by the...

I characterize cosyndication relationships between lead banks and syndicate participants and identify their effects on borrowing capacity during the recent financial crisis. Cosyndication relationships are persistent and reduce bank-bank information asymmetries as measured by retained share....

To estimate the expected cost of technical default for equityholders, we analyze the stock market reaction to changes in the ex-ante likelihood of technical default. Our large-sample, ex-ante estimates exceed five percent of equity value, which reflects material monetary and risk consequences of...

Internal capital markets are important determinants of investment and economic growth in the modern economy. We exploit a regulatory experiment on short selling restrictions and microdata on multinationals' foreign operations to test whether external governance pressure from short selling...

To meet short-term benchmarks, lenders may alter their monitoring behavior, providing a channel for short-termism incentives to spill over into the corporate sector. We find that lenders with short-termism incentives enforce material covenant violations at higher rates. Further, they target...