It was once conventional wisdom that lenders routinely influenced corporate managers’ decision making. Covenants constrained borrower risk taking and compelled specific affirmative obligations to protect lenders. Recent policy discussion, however, laments loan markets’ turn to various forms...

We examine the impact on a firm when it is exogenously forced to switch its bank relationship from one branch to another branch of the same bank. We show the effect depends directly on the relative balance between the hard accounting information provided to the bank by the firm, as part of the...

We provide a novel empirical finding that the recent anti-corruption investigations in China are associated with credit reallocation from less productive, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to more productive, non-SOEs. The empirical strategy exploits staggered investigations as exogenous shocks to...

When contemplating Chapter 11, firms often need to seek financing for their continuing operations in bankruptcy. Because such financing would otherwise be hard to find, the Bankruptcy Code authorizes debtors to offer sweeteners to debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders. These inducements can be...

It was once conventional wisdom that lenders routinely influenced corporate managers’ decision making. Covenants constrained borrower risk taking and compelled specific affirmative obligations to protect lenders. Recent policy discussion, however, laments loan markets’ turn to various forms...

We find that senior loan lender control is positively associated with a firm's corporate bond yield spread at issuance. A one standard deviation change in the number of covenants on the strictest loan on a firm's balance sheet is associated with a 15 basis points higher yield spread at bond...

We investigate how borrowers' corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country-level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with...

Firm prestige reduces the cost of bank loans. Specifically, when borrowers are included in Fortune's list of “America's Most Admired Companies” (MAC), their loan costs decline by approximately 13 bps or US$5.122 million, on average. The effect appears causal. The negative relation between...

This paper studies the effect of senior lender control, as measured by bank loan covenants, on the pricing of new bond issues. We find a U-shaped relation between the number of financial covenants on a firm's loan contract and the bond yield spread. Our results suggest that bondholders initially...

We document the importance of loan covenants to observed hedging outcomes, by studying lending agreements and derivative positions of U.S. oil and gas producers. The emergence of fracking technology was accompanied by sharp increases in capital spending and borrowing. The contracts involved...