Debt Maturity Structure and Accounting Conservatism

This study examines the association between debt maturity structure and accounting conservatism. Short‐maturity debt can mitigate agency costs of debt arising from information asymmetry and suboptimal investment problems inherent in debt financing. As such, debt‐contracting demand for accounting conservatism is expected to be lower in the presence of more short‐maturity debt. We find that short‐maturity debt is negatively associated with accounting conservatism. As firms could commit to more accounting conservatism to gain access to long‐maturity debt, we conduct lead‐lag tests of the direction of causality, and the results suggest that more short‐maturity debt leads to less conservative reporting, rather than the reverse. We also find the negative relation between short‐maturity debt and accounting conservatism is more pronounced among financially distressed firms, where ex ante severity of agency costs of debt are higher. Collectively, our results contribute to our understanding of the role of accounting conservatism in debt contracting and show how debt maturity, a key and pervasive feature of creditor protection in debt contracting, affects accounting conservatism.     

Corporate Debt Maturity and Acquisition Decisions

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of corporate debt maturity on firms’ acquisition decisions using a large sample of acquisitions from 1991 to 2010. We find that firms with shorter debt maturity are less likely to undertake acquisitions. If they do, they are more likely to undertake smaller deals, take more time to complete, are less likely to make all cash offers, and tend to use less cash in the payment. These results support the predictions of the increased liquidity risk hypothesis. We also find that acquirers with shorter debt maturity realize higher announcement returns and experience better long‐term stock returns and operating performance. These results suggest that short debt maturity improves the efficiency of capital allocation through acquisition decisions.     

Tobin's Q, Debt Overhang, and Investment

Incorporating debt in a dynamic real options framework, we show that underinvestment stems from truncation of equity's horizon at default. Debt overhang distorts both the level and composition of investment, with underinvestment being more severe for long‐lived assets. An empirical proxy for the shadow price of capital to equity is derived. Use of this proxy yields a structural test for debt overhang and its mitigation through issuance of additional secured debt. Using measurement error‐consistent GMM estimators, we find a statistically significant debt overhang effect regardless of firms' ability to issue additional secured debt.     

Executive Compensation and the Maturity Structure of Corporate Debt

Executive compensation influences managerial risk preferences through executives' portfolio sensitivities to changes in stock prices (delta) and stock return volatility (vega). Large deltas discourage managerial risk‐taking, while large vegas encourage risk‐taking. Theory suggests that short‐maturity debt mitigates agency costs of debt by constraining managerial risk preferences. We posit and find evidence of a negative (positive) relation between CEO portfolio deltas (vegas) and short‐maturity debt. We also find that short‐maturity debt mitigates the influence of vega‐ and delta‐related incentives on bond yields. Overall, our empirical evidence shows that short‐term debt mitigates agency costs of debt arising from compensation risk.     

Industry Structure and Corporate Debt Maturity

We examine how industry competition affects firms’ choice of short‐term debt. We find that the percentage of short‐term debt is positively related to industry concentration at low levels of concentration, and inversely related to industry concentration at higher levels of concentration. This nonlinear relation is stronger in industries where firms are either more homogeneous or compete more aggressively. Moreover, we find that firms with shorter‐maturity debt are less aggressive than their rivals in the product market. The overall evidence suggests that although financial contracts alleviate agency problems, they exacerbate the risk of predation.     

Corporate Leverage and Specialized Investments by Customers and Suppliers

A company's performance in the product market depends in part on the willingness of its suppliers and customers to invest in the relationship—to make specialized investments of human as well as financial capital that may have no value outside that relationship. Consistent with Stewart Myers's concept of debt overhang and underinvestment, the authors hypothesize that companies can encourage their suppliers and other key stakeholders to make such specialized investments by limiting their use of debt financing, thereby addressing their stakeholders' concerns about their long‐term performance and staying power. In this article, the authors report the findings of a recently published study of a sample of U.S. industrial companies during the period 1984‐2003. Using the benchmark input‐output accounts for the U.S. economy, the authors identified supplier and customer industries for each company in their sample while also collecting data on the firm's actual suppliers and customers from Compustat's segment files. Using empirical proxies for the intensity of specialized investments, they find that companies that operate in environments requiring specialized investments by suppliers and customers tend to operate with lower levels of debt. At the same time, the authors report evidence suggesting that the suppliers and customers of highly leveraged companies make lower levels of specialized investment than the suppliers and customers of less leveraged firms.     

Is Debt Relief Efficient?

When developing countries announce debt relief agreements under the Brady Plan, their stock markets appreciate by an average of 60% in real dollar terms—a $42 billion increase in shareholder value. There is no significant stock market increase for a control group of countries that do not sign Brady agreements. The stock market appreciations successfully forecast higher future resource transfers, investment, and growth. Since the market capitalization of U.S. commercial banks with developing country loan exposure also rises—by $13 billion—the results suggest that both borrower and lenders can benefit from debt relief when the borrower suffers from debt overhang.     

Accruals Quality and Debt Maturity Structure

In this paper we use panel data and GMM estimation to examine the effect of accounting quality on debt maturity structure in a bank‐based financial system and show that, even after controlling for unobservable heterogeneity, endogeneity, variables reflecting operating volatility and the cost of debt, firms with poor accounting quality face a shorter debt term than firms with higher accounting quality. This association between accounting quality and debt maturity is consistent with accounting quality as a means of reducing information asymmetry problems and improving the monitoring of managers.     

Asset Maturity, Debt Covenants, and Debt Maturity Choice

The existing research on debt‐maturity under asymmetric information has focused on the impact of differential information regarding asset quality on the debt maturity decision. This research has generally indicated the optimality of short‐term debt financing as a vehicle of mitigating the adverse selection problem. In this paper, I consider the impact of information asymmetry regarding the maturity structure of cash flows on the debt maturity decision. In this context, long‐term debt is generally the form of debt financing most effective in alleviating the adverse selection problem. I also show that costs of adverse selection may induce some mismatching of debt maturity and asset maturity in the presence of significant transaction costs.     

Mortgage Debt Overhang: Reduced Investment by Homeowners at Risk of Default

Homeowners at risk of default face a debt overhang that reduces their incentive to invest in their property: in expectation, some value created by investments in the property will go to the lender. This agency conflict affects housing investments. Homeowners at risk of default cut back substantially on home improvements and mortgage principal payments, even when they appear financially unconstrained. Meanwhile, they do not reduce spending on assets that they may retain in default, including home appliances, furniture, and vehicles. These findings highlight an important financial friction that has stifled housing investment since the Great Recession.     

The Determinants of Long‐Term Corporate Debt Issuances

A significant proportion of the debt issued by investment‐grade firms has maturities greater than 20 years. In this paper we provide evidence that gap‐filling behavior is an important determinant of these very long‐term issues. Using data on individual corporate debt issues between 1987 and 2009, we find that gap‐filling behavior is more prominent in the very long end of the maturity spectrum where the required risk capital makes arbitrage costly. In addition, changes in the supply of long‐term government bonds affect not just the choice of maturity but also the overall level of corporate borrowing.     

Investment Horizons and Information

We examine the relation between institutions' investment horizons on firms' financing and investment decisions. Firms with larger short‐term institutional ownership use less debt financing and invest more in corporate liquidity. In contrast, firms with larger long‐term institutional ownership use more internal funds, less external equity financing, and preserve investments in long‐term assets. These results are primarily driven by the variation in informational preferences of different institutions. We argue that short‐term (long‐term) institutions collect and use value‐neutral (value‐enhancing) information.     

Austerity and Private Debt

This study provides empirical evidence that the costs of austerity crucially depend on the level of private indebtedness. In particular, fiscal consolidations lead to severe contractions when implemented in high private‐debt states. Contrary, fiscal consolidations have no significant effect on economic activity when private debt is low. These results are robust to alternative definitions of private‐debt overhang, the composition of fiscal consolidations, and controlling for the state of the business cycle and government debt overhang. I show that deterioration in household balance sheets is important to understand private debt‐dependent effects of austerity.     

Can Managers Successfully Time the Maturity Structure of Their Debt Issues?

This paper provides a rational explanation for the apparent ability of managers to successfully time the maturity of their debt issues. We show that a structural break in excess bond returns during the early 1980s generates a spurious correlation between the fraction of long‐term debt in total debt issues and future excess bond returns. Contrary to Baker, Taliaferro, and Wurgler (2006) , we show that the presence of structural breaks can lead to nonsense regressions, whether or not there is any small sample bias. Tests using firm‐level data further confirm that managers are unable to time the debt market successfully.     

Presidential Address, Committing to Commit: Short-term Debt When Enforcement Is Costly

In legal systems with expensive or ineffective contract enforcement, it is difficult to induce lenders to enforce debt contracts. If lenders do not enforce, borrowers will have incentives to misbehave. Lenders have incentives to enforce given bad news when debt is short‐term and subject to runs caused by externalities across lenders. Lenders will not undo these externalities by negotiation. The required number of lenders increases with enforcement costs. A very high enforcement cost can exceed the ex ante incentive benefit of enforcement. Removing lenders' right to immediately enforce their debt with a “bail‐in” can improve the ex ante incentives of borrowers.     

Growth Opportunities and the Choice of Leverage, Debt Maturity, and Covenants

We investigate the effect of growth opportunities in a firm's investment opportunity set on its joint choice of leverage, debt maturity, and covenants. Using a database that contains detailed debt covenant information, we provide large‐sample evidence of the incidence of covenants in public debt and construct firm‐level indices of bondholder covenant protection. We find that covenant protection is increasing in growth opportunities, debt maturity, and leverage. We also document that the negative relation between leverage and growth opportunities is significantly attenuated by covenant protection, suggesting that covenants can mitigate the agency costs of debt for high growth firms.     

公债的利率期限结构与成本管理

在理论上公债期限与公债利率是密切相关的,但是,由于流动性偏好理论的假设前提(有效市场假设)与现实不符,致使"公债期限越短、利息成本越低"的观点在实践中不一定成立.研究表明,只有政府在预测未来债券利率走势方面具有比市场更为优势的地位,它才能够通过期限选择降低债务成本.我国目前正满足这一要求,因而通过期限管理降低债务成本是完全可能的.     

Short‐Term Corporate Debt around the World

Short‐term corporate debt as a proportion of total debt issued by public firms varies greatly across countries, between 28% in the United States and 78% in China. This paper argues that the interaction between information asymmetry and legal protection of creditors is an important determinant of debt maturity. When short‐term debt plays a dual role as signaling and commitment devices, a reduction in information asymmetry has a larger impact on debt maturity when creditor rights are weaker. We find empirical support for this prediction using firm‐level data from 45 countries around the world.     

Debt Overhang and Lack of Lender's Commitment

The debt overhang of sovereigns or firms is modeled in the recent literature as a constrained efficient outcome of dynamic debt contracts under the lack of the borrower's commitment, where debt relief is not Pareto-improving. The early literature observes another type of debt overhang where the borrower is discouraged from expending effort, anticipating the lender to take all output ex post. We show that this inefficiency is due to the lack of the lender's commitment and debt relief is Pareto-improving. Nevertheless, debt overhang may persist, as frictional bargaining over debt relief can take a long time.     

Debt,Agency Costs,and Industry Equilibrium

We show that risk characteristics of projects' cash flows are endogenously determined by the investment decisions of all firms in an industry. As a result, in reasonable settings, financial structures which create incentives to expropriate debtholders by increasing risk are shown not to reduce value in an industry equilibrium. Without taxes, capital structure is irrelevant for individual firms despite its effect on the equityholders' incentives, but the maximum total amount of debt in the industry is determinate. Allowing for a corporate tax advantage of debt, capital structure becomes relevant but firms are indifferent between distinct alternative debt levels.