The Debt-Contracting Value of Accounting Information and Loan Syndicate Structure

We investigate how both the ownership structure and explicit contractual structure of syndicated loan deals are shaped by the debt‐contracting value (DCV) of borrowers' accounting information. DCV captures the inherent ability of firms' accounting numbers to capture credit quality deterioration in a timely fashion. We hypothesize and document that when a borrower's accounting information possesses higher DCV, information asymmetry between the lead arranger and other syndicate participants is lower, allowing lead arrangers to hold a smaller proportion of new loan deals. Further, we document that the influence of DCV on the proportion of the loan retained is conditional on the lead arranger's reputation, the existence of a credit rating, and the lead arranger's previous relationships with the same borrower. Finally, we find that when loans include performance pricing provisions, the likelihood that the single performance measure used is an accounting ratio, rather than a credit rating, is increasing in DCV.     

Incentivizing Calculated Risk‐Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers

We conduct an experiment with commercial bank loan officers to test how performance compensation affects risk assessment and lending. High‐powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending decisions. This effect is muted, however, by deferred compensation and limited liability, two standard features of loan officer compensation contracts. We find that career concerns and personality traits affect loan officer behavior, but show that the response to incentives does not vary with traits such as risk‐aversion, optimism, or overconfidence. Finally, we present evidence that incentives distort the assessment of credit risk, even among professionals with many years of experience.     

Screening soft information: evidence from loan officers

I evaluate how loan officers screen uncodified, soft information using data from China. After documenting substantial differences in loan decisions and outcomes across loan officers, I develop and estimate a screening model incorporating screening ability and beliefs regarding ability. Estimates imply that the typical loan officer is risk-averse, has heterogeneous screening ability, and behaves overconfidently—behaving as if he or she observes more from soft information than what the data would indicate. However, I still find that loan officers offer value over benchmarks that ignore soft information. Counterfactuals on compensation, loan assignment, and training further explore the limits of screening.     

Information and Incentives Inside the Firm: Evidence from Loan Officer Rotation

We present evidence that reassigning tasks among agents can alleviate moral hazard in communication. A rotation policy that routinely reassigns loan officers to borrowers of a commercial bank affects the officers' reporting behavior. When an officer anticipates rotation, reports are more accurate and contain more bad news about the borrower's repayment prospects. As a result, the rotation policy makes bank lending decisions more sensitive to officer reports. The threat of rotation improves communication because self‐reporting bad news has a smaller negative effect on an officer's career prospects than bad news exposed by a successor.     

Correlated Default and Financial Intermediation

Financial intermediation naturally arises when knowing how loan payoffs are correlated is valuable for managing investments but lenders cannot easily observe that relationship. I show this result using a costly enforcement model in which lenders need ex post incentives to enforce payments from defaulted loans and borrowers' payoffs are correlated. When projects have correlated outcomes, learning the state of one project (via enforcement) provides information about the states of other projects. A large correlated portfolio provides ex post incentives for enforcement. Thus, intermediation dominates direct lending, and intermediaries are financed with risk‐free deposits, earn positive profits, and hold systemic default risk.     

CEO Risk‐taking Incentives and Bank Loan Syndicate Structure

This paper investigates the effects of a borrowing firm's CEO risk‐taking incentives on the structure of the firm's syndicated loans. When CEO risk‐taking incentives are high, syndicates are structured to facilitate better due diligence and monitoring efforts. These syndicates have a smaller number of total lenders and are more concentrated, and lead arrangers will retain a greater portion of the loan. Moreover, CEO risk‐taking incentives have a lesser effect on the syndicate structure when lead arrangers have a good reputation and a prior lending relationship with a borrowing firm, while they have a greater effect on the syndicate structure when borrowing firms have low information transparency, are financially distressed or have low growth prospects.     

Loan officers and relationship lending to SMEs

Previous research suggests that loan officers may play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we analyze this hypothesis and find empirical evidence that indicates that loan officer activities are associated with bank production of soft information. We also find that loan officers at small banks produce more soft information than at large banks, but large banks appear to have the equivalent potential to underwrite relationship loans. Nevertheless, large banks choose instead to focus their resources on transactions lending.     

Financial Reporting and Credit Ratings: On the Effects of Competition in the Rating Industry and Rating Agencies' Gatekeeper Role

This paper studies firms' financial reporting incentives in the presence of strategic credit rating agencies and how these incentives are affected by the level of competition in the rating industry and by rating agencies' role as gatekeepers to debt markets. We develop a model featuring an entrepreneur who seeks project financing from a perfectly competitive debt market. After publicly disclosing a financial report, the entrepreneur can purchase credit ratings from rating agencies that strategically choose their rating fees and rating inflation. We derive the following core results: (1) More rating industry competition leads to stronger corporate misreporting incentives if ratings are sufficiently precise or if rating agencies assume a gatekeeper role. Under imperfect rating industry competition, (2) agencies' gatekeeper role primarily weakens firms' misreporting incentives, which then influences rating agencies' strategies, and (3) firms' misreporting and rating agencies' rating inflation can be strategic complements when agencies assume a gatekeeper role. (4) Regulatory initiatives aimed at increasing rating industry competition or at weakening rating agencies' gatekeeper role improve investment efficiency as long as corporate misreporting incentives are not significantly strengthened.     

CEO Incentives,Relationship Lending,and the Cost of Corporate Borrowing

We investigate how lending relationships attenuate the conflict of interest between creditors and shareholders that arises from chief executive officer (CEO) compensation contracts. We find that lending relationships mitigate the influence of CEO risk‐taking incentives on loan spreads, especially for informationally opaque firms. In addition, lending relationships attenuate the impact of CEO risk‐taking incentives on maturity and collateral requirements. This article highlights the importance of bank monitoring through lending relationships to mitigate managerial risk‐shifting activities that arise from equity incentives.     

CFOs and CEOs: Who have the most influence on earnings management?

This study examines the association between chief financial officer (CFO) equity incentives and earnings management. Chief executive officer (CEO) equity incentives have been shown to be associated with accruals management and the likelihood of beating analyst forecasts (Bergstresser and Philippon, 2006; Cheng and Warfield, 2005). Because CFOs’ primary responsibility is financial reporting, CFO equity incentives should play a stronger role than those of the CEO in earnings management. We find that the magnitude of accruals and the likelihood of beating analyst forecasts are more sensitive to CFO equity incentives than to those of the CEO. Our evidence supports the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) new disclosure requirement on CFO compensation.     

Covenants and Collateral as Incentives to Monitor

Although monitoring borrowers is thought to be a major function of financial institutions, the presence of other claimants reduces an institutional lender's incentives to do this. Thus loan contracts must be structured to enhance the lender's incentives to monitor. Covenants make a loan's effective maturity, and the ability to collateralize makes a loan's effective priority, contingent on monitoring by the lender. Thus both covenants and collateral can be motivated as contractual devices that increase a lender's incentive to monitor. These results are consistent with a number of stylized facts about the use of covenants and collateral in institutional lending.     

Moody’s investors service response to the consultative paper issued by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision “A new capital adequacy framework”

Moody's endorses the Basel Committee's proposal to use banks' internal risk assessments to refine the Basel Accord's risk weights on bank assets and commitments. External risk assessments, such as Moody's credit ratings, will likely play a supporting role as direct inputs into banks' internal rating systems and as tools for benchmarking and validating those systems. However, the widespread use of ratings in regulation threatens to undermine the quality of credit over time by increasing rating shopping, decreasing rating agency independence, and reducing incentives to innovate and improve the quality of ratings. This paper discusses how bank regulators can use external ratings in ways that mitigate the adverse incentives created by the resulting regulatory demand for rating agency services.     

Rating manipulation and creditworthiness for platform economy: Evidence from peer-to-peer lending

Credit rating provides essential information on a project's credit risk to both lenders and borrowers. On exploring over five million lending listings from a leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, a mismatch phenomenon was observed between credit rating and default probability of P2P listings across different credit rating groups, despite controlling for common credit-related characteristics. Further looking into the misevaluation of credit risk, it was found that this phenomenon was more pronounced when an unexpected intervention was likely to be applied in rating projects, such as listings with high credit ratings, large loan amounts, and less personal information. The study results question the credibility of related research that uses internal credit ratings, because this variable is likely to be manipulated by the platform.     

Seeing is important: the usefulness of video information in P2P

P2P lending is an important research subject of rising internet finance research. This paper uses unique data from Renrendai, a leading platform in China, to test the influence of video information on P2P lending behavior. Results suggest that, first, the lower the borrower's credit rating is, the more likely they are to provide video information. Second, compared to the video‐information‐absent borrowers, the otherwise borrowers can get easier access to a loan and offer a lower interest rate. These results indicate that compared to text messages, video information can increase the borrower's creditworthiness and reduce the transaction risk. Thereupon seeing is important in online P2P lending. Third, when the borrower's credit rating is lower, the video effect is significant. The study makes sense in terms of the enrichment of P2P lending literature and the enlightenment on decision‐making of both lenders and borrowers.     

Firms' Off-Balance Sheet and Hybrid Debt Financing: Evidence from Their Book-Tax Reporting Differences

We match large U.S. corporations' tax returns during 1989–2001 to their financial statements to construct a firm‐level proxy of firms' use of off‐balance sheet and hybrid debt financing. We find that firms with less favorable prior‐period Standard & Poor's (S&P) bond ratings or higher leverage ratios in comparison to their industry report greater amounts of interest expense on their tax returns than to investors and creditors on their financial statements. These between‐firm results are consistent with credit‐constrained firms using more structured financing arrangements. Our within‐firm tests also suggest that firms use more structured financing arrangements when they enter into contractual loan agreements that provide incentives to manage debt ratings. Specifically, we find that after controlling for S&P bond rating and industry‐adjusted leverage, our sample firms report greater amounts of interest expenses for tax than for financial statement purposes when they enter into performance pricing contracts that use senior debt rating covenants to set interest rates. Furthermore, we find that the greatest book‐tax reporting changes occur when firms become closer to violating these debt rating covenants. These latter findings are consistent with firms' contractual debt covenants influencing their use of off‐balance sheet and hybrid debt financing.     

Competition in the credit rating Industry: Benefits for investors and issuers

We empirically investigate the benefits of multiple ratings not only at issuance of debt instruments but also during the subsequent monitoring phase. Using a record of monthly credit rating migration data on all U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities rated by Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch between 1985 and 2012 (154,600 tranches), our results provide empirical evidence that rating agencies put more effort in rating and outlook revisions when tranches have assigned multiple ratings. Furthermore, we see that in the case of multiple ratings, agencies do a better job in discriminating tranches with respect to default risk. On the downside, we observe a shift in collateral towards senior tranches and incentives for issuers to engage in rating shopping activities, but find no evidence that rating agencies exploit such behavior to attract more rating business. Our results contribute to the literature on information production of credit ratings and extend the perspective to the monitoring period after issuance.     

The Effect of Lender Identity on a Borrowing Firm's Equity Return

Previous research demonstrates that a firm's common stock price tends to fall when it issues new public securities. By contrast, commercial bank loans elicit significantly positive borrower returns. This article investigates whether the lender's identity influences the market's reaction to a loan announcement. Although we find no significant difference between the market's response to bank and nonbank loans, we do find that lenders with a higher credit rating are associated with larger abnormal borrower returns. This evidence complements earlier findings that an auditor's or investment banker's perceived “quality” signals valuable information about firm value to uninformed market investors.     

Bond Covenants and Delegated Monitoring

This paper examines alternative contracting arrangements available to a firm seeking to finance an investment project. The authors consider the choice between loan contracts with covenants based on noisy indicators of the firm's financial health and loan contracts enforced by a monitoring specialist. In one interpretation, the specialist is a financial intermediary. The firm's choice is shown to depend upon the firm's credit rating, the accuracy of financial indicators of the firm's condition, the loss from premature liquidation of the firm's project, and the cost of monitoring.     

Internal control quality and information asymmetry in the secondary loan market

We examine the association between disclosure of internal control deficiencies (ICDs) and information asymmetry (IA) in the US secondary loan market. We also investigate which types of ICDs intensify or mitigate conditions of information asymmetry in the same market. Relying on loan syndication, loan credit rating, financial debt covenants and loan size, we further explore the effect of loan specific characteristics on the association between ICDs and IA. Consistent with our predictions, we find that while ICDs increase information asymmetry in the secondary loan market, the inimitable characteristics in the secondary loan market (e.g., syndication, loan credit rating, financial covenants, and loan size) help to mitigate such negative consequences of the disclosure of ICDs on the firm’s informational environment. We further find that disclosures of ICDs for firms in regulated industries help to mitigate the negative consequences of ICDs disclosures on IA.     

Reliability-Relevance Trade-Offs and the Efficiency of Aggregation

This paper studies how an accountant's method of aggregating information in a financial report is affected by differences in the reliability and relevance of components of the report. We study a firm that hires an accountant to produce a report that reveals information to investors regarding the returns to the firm's past investments. In constructing the report, the accountant must combine information elicited from the firm's manager with other information directly observable to the accountant. The manager's information is assumed to be directly observable only by the manager and to be of superior quality to the other information available to the accountant. Reliability‐relevance trade‐offs arise because as the accountant places more weight on the manager's report, potentially more useful information gets included in the report, at the cost of encouraging the manager to distort his or her information to a greater extent. Capital market participants anticipate this behavior and price the firm accordingly. We show how the market's price response to the release of the firm's aggregate report, the efficiency of the firm's investment decisions, and the manager's incentives to manipulate the soft information under his or her control are all affected by—and affect—the aggregation procedure the accountant adopts. In addition, we identify a broad range of circumstances under which aggregated reports are strictly more efficient than disaggregated reports because aggregation tempers the manager's misreporting incentives. We also demonstrate that, as any given component of the aggregated accounting report becomes softer, the equilibrium level of the firm's investment diminishes and the market places greater weight on the remaining components of the report.