CEO inside debt and corporate debt maturity structure

This paper examines the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) inside debt holdings and corporate debt maturity. We provide robust evidence that inside debt has a positive effect on short-maturity debt and that this effect is concentrated in financially unconstrained firms that face lower refinancing risk. Our analysis further shows that CEO inside debt helps reduce the cost of debt financing. Overall, our results indicate that managerial holdings of inside debt facilitate access to external debt financing and reduce refinancing risk, thus incentivizing managers to use less costly shorter term debt.     

Time-varying managerial overconfidence and corporate debt maturity structure

We examine the impact of managerial overconfidence on corporate debt maturity. We build upon the argument that managerial overconfidence is likely to mitigate the underinvestment problem, which is often the major concern for long-term debt investors. Within this context, we hypothesise that managerial overconfidence increases debt maturity. Our empirical evidence, based on time-varying measures of overconfidence derived from computational linguistic analysis and directors’ dealings in their own companies’ shares, supports this hypothesis. Specifically, we find that the changes in both first person singular pronouns and optimistic tone are positively related to the change in debt maturity. Moreover, we find that the insider trading-based overconfidence of CEO, who is most likely to influence investment decision and thus the underinvestment problem, has a stronger impact on debt maturity than the overconfidence of other directors (e.g. CFO). Overall, our study provides initial evidence for a positive overconfidence-debt maturity relation via overconfidence mitigating the agency cost of long-term debt.     

Implications of public corruption for local firms: Evidence from corporate debt maturity

Using political corruption conviction data from the U.S. Department of Justice, we examine the impact of local corruption on firms’ debt maturity structure while exploring both demand-side and supply-side explanations. Our results support the demand-side story and indicate that firms in high corruption areas utilize less short-term debt to mitigate liquidity and refinancing risks. Consistent with this, we find the effect is more pronounced among firms with smaller size, lower asset redeployability, and higher volatility. Our findings remain robust to the inclusion of an array of controls expected to influence debt maturity preferences as well as time, industry, and state fixed effects. Moreover, a seemingly unrelated regression approach, instrumental variables regression, propensity score matching, placebo analyses, and alternative corruption measures corroborate our findings. Altogether, our results indicate that firms alter their debt maturity choices in response to local corruption to limit refinancing risk and the uncertainty created by corrupt government officials.     

Firm location and corporate debt

This study examines the influence of a firm’s geographical location on corporate debt and provides evidence that the higher cost of collecting information on firms distant from urban areas has significant implications on a wide array of corporate debt characteristics. We find that rural firms face higher debt yield spreads and attract smaller and less prestigious bank syndicates than urban firms. Rural firms attempt to reduce their informational disadvantage by relying more on relationship banking. Our results on the effect of location on corporate debt are robust to the inclusion of an extensive set of firm and issue characteristics.     

International reserves and the maturity of external debt

This paper studies how the level of international reserves affects the maturity structure of external debt. We show in an illustrative theoretical model that reserves lengthen the maturity of external debt via a flattening of the yield curve. Using data of 66 emerging and developing countries and applying different econometric approaches, we find robust evidence that reserves increase the share of long-term in total external debt. Results hold for private and public external debt individually. Taking reserves and their effect on the debt maturity structure together, they reinforce financial stability.     

Idiosyncratic risk and debt maturity dispersion

We investigate the relation between idiosyncratic asset risk and debt maturity dispersion. Idiosyncratic asset volatility represents significant risk, which can impede the ability to obtain or maintain external debt financing necessary for business operations, and is difficult to control given its unpredictable nature. We find that this risk is managed through the maturity structure of debt: firms with higher idiosyncratic asset volatility also have more dispersed maturity structures. Consistent with active management of rollover risk, this relation is weaker for younger firms and stronger for firms without significant credit lines.     

The impact of financial reporting quality on debt maturity: the case of private firms

We examine whether the debt maturity structure of privately held firms is associated with the quality of their earnings numbers. We argue that earnings numbers that are better able to predict future cash flows lower information asymmetry between privately held firms and their creditors, improving privately held firms’ access to long-term debt. Furthermore, we examine whether the relationship between privately held firms’ earnings quality and their debt maturity differs between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and larger privately held firms. Using detailed financial statement information from a sample of privately held Belgian firms, we find that earnings quality is positively associated with the likelihood of having long-term debt and with the proportion of long-term debt in total debt. Further, we report evidence that these associations are more pronounced for SMEs than for larger privately held firms, which is consistent with smaller firms entailing more fundamental risk for creditors.     

Debt, debt structure and corporate performance after unsuccessful takeovers: evidence from targets that remain independent

Significant increases in the level of target leverage have been previously documented following unsuccessful takeover attempts. This increased leverage may signal managerial commitment to improved performance, suggesting that corporate performance and leverage should be positively related. If, however, the increased leverage leads to further managerial entrenchment, then corporate performance and leverage should be negatively related. In this paper, we reexamine both motivations for the observed increase in leverage. Furthermore, we argue that changes in the composition of debt are also important, besides changes in the level of leverage. In particular, bank debt has frequently been assigned a proactive, beneficial monitoring role in the literature. Besides confirming the increase in the level of leverage, we also document increases in bank debt surrounding cancelled takeovers. As a result, we find a more complex relation between corporate performance and debt use: Overall, the relation between corporate performance and leverage is negative, as predicted by a dominant entrenchment effect. However, increases in bank debt reduce the adverse effect of the increase in the level of leverage.     

Firm life cycle and debt maturity structure: evidence from China

This study examines the effect of firm life cycle on debt maturity structure (DMS) in China. We reveal that DMS is relatively low in the introduction and recession periods, while long‐term debt ratio of growth companies is high. Companies in booming industries need funds but have difficulty obtaining long‐term loans, whereas companies in recession can use more long‐term loans. The Chow test shows that DMS changed markedly before and after the new normal of China’s economy and the implementation of the ‘mass entrepreneurship and innovation campaign’. It is urgent to address sunset industries to improve the efficiency of resource allocation.     

The determinants of debt maturity in Australian firms

We examine the determinants of debt maturity in the Australian capital market with the Top 400 firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for the period 1989–2006. We find that Australian firms not only exhibit a positive leverage–maturity relationship but also use short‐term debt to signal their high quality to the market. Our results are robust to different estimation methods that control for endogeneity and error‐dependence. We also find that ignoring the interaction between leverage and maturity can lead to erroneous conclusions about the support for the matching principle, the agency costs hypothesis and the transaction costs hypothesis.     

In search of robust methods for dynamic panel data models in empirical corporate finance

We examine which methods are appropriate for estimating dynamic panel data models in empirical corporate finance. Our simulations show that the instrumental variable and GMM estimators are unreliable, and sensitive to the presence of unobserved heterogeneity, residual serial correlation, and changes in control parameters. The bias-corrected fixed-effects estimators, based on an analytical, bootstrap, or indirect inference approach, are found to be the most appropriate and robust methods. These estimators perform reasonably well even in models with fractional dependent variables censored at [0, 1]. We verify these results in two empirical applications, on dynamic capital structure and cash holdings.     

Institutions,banking structure and the cost of debt: new international evidence

This paper analyses the effect of institutions and the structure of the banking system on the cost of debt for a sample of firms from 37 countries. The cost of debt decreases with the rule of law, the protection of creditors’ rights and the weight of banks in the economy. Bank financing and bank concentration have a positive differential effect on the cost of debt in those countries where the financial difficulties of banks are greater. Legal enforcement, the protection of creditors’ rights and the weight of bank financing have a greater influence in countries with a lower degree of economic development.     

Determinants of corporate debt securities in the Euro area

Abstract

This study examines the macroeconomic determinants of corporate debt securities in the euro area. The financing costs, as approximated by the cost of debt securities vis-à-vis other sources of corporate finance, and financing needs, as captured by mergers and acquisitions and gross domestic product, are found to be significant determinants in the short and long run. The empirical results are also supportive of substitution between debt security and internal financing unrelated to cost of differentials in the short run and of differences in the determination of long- and short-term debt securities. These findings are robust across different samples and specifications.     

An empirical analysis of property appraisal and mortgage redlining

The recent literature advances a hypothesis that addresses the possibility of mortgage redlining caused by a dynamic information externality in property appraisals and mortgage lending. In particular, Lang and Nakamura (1993) hypothesize that because property appraisals depend on past transactions, appraisals in neighborhoods where transactions were infrequent tend to be less precise. The greater uncertainty about house valuation in such neighborhoods can lead mortgage lenders to impose stringent requirements on borrowers. Lang and Nakamura's article, like most economic analysis of property appraisals, is theoretical. Using a sample of mortgages purchased by Fannie Mae, we present preliminary research results that cast doubt on appraisal behavioral rules such as weighted averages or backward-looking expectations on which Lang and Nakamura and other theoretical studies are based. Instead, our results refocus attention on the moral hazard issues of appraisal. We find that in more than 80 percent of the cases, the appraisal is between 0 and 5 percent above the transaction purchase price, in only 5 percent of the cases is the appraisal lower, and in 30 percent of the cases, the appraisal and transaction prices are identical. It would take a strong statistical model to generate such occurrences. Our resutls also indicate that appraisal outcomes are used as a risk factor with different weights for loans with different characteristics (loan-to-value ratios and house prices). The results suggest that more empirical investigation of appraisal practices be conducted to verify the validity of conventional wisdom embedded in theoretical studies, and we offer an econometric framework toward this end.     

The market for corporate control and the cost of debt

How do bondholders view the existence of an open market for corporate control? Between 1985 and 1991, 30 states in the U.S. enacted business combination (BC) laws, raising the cost of corporate takeovers. Relying on these exogenous events, we estimate the influence of the market for corporate control on the cost of debt. We identify different channels through which an open market for corporate control can benefit or harm bondholders: a reduction in managerial slack or the “quiet life,” resulting in higher profitability and firm value; a coinsurance effect, in which firms become less risky after being acquired; and an increasing leverage effect, in which bondholder wealth is expropriated through leverage-increasing takeovers. Consistent with the first two mechanisms, we find that the cost of debt rose after the passage of the BC laws; moreover, it rose sharply for firms in non-competitive industries, and for firms rated speculative-grade. In contrast, there is virtually no effect for firms in competitive industries, or firms rated investment-grade.     

金融发展与企业家精神：来自中国省级面板数据的经验证据

熊彼特认为,企业家精神与金融发展具有重要联系。本文基于1998—2008年中国省级面板数据,采用系统广义矩估计法实证分析了金融发展对企业家精神的影响。分析发现,中国金融发展与创业精神而非创新精神具有显著的正向联系。文章的政策含义是,消除对民营经济的信贷约束及发展风险投资资本市场,对于企业家精神的培育十分重要。     

The Determinants of Debt Maturity Structure: Evidence from France,Germany and the UK

We examine the determinants of the debt maturity structure of French, German and British firms. These countries represent different financial and legal traditions that may have implications on corporate debt maturity structure. Our model incorporates the factors representing three major theories (tax considerations, liquidity and signalling, and contracting costs) of debt maturity. It also controls for capital market conditions. The results confirm the applicability of most theories of debt maturity structure for the UK firms. However, the evidence from France and Germany are mixed. Overall the findings suggest that the debt maturity structure of a firm is determined by firm‐specific factors and the country's financial systems and institutional traditions in which it operates.     

企业发债和贷款期限的差异化:基于增量法的实证研究

已有文献主要从资产负债表法来实证研究企业负债期限结构的影响因素,本文以我国企业在1998～2008年企业发行的各类债券和银行贷款为研究对象,运用增量法从企业财务特征和债务契约属性等方面对企业增量债务期限的影响因素进行实证研究,采用了GMM计量方法,并通过对比分析筛选出了影响企业发债和贷款期限差异化的关键因素。研究表明:企业规模越大,利润率越高,具备担保,信用评级和授信比率越高,其债务期限越长。企业若选择发债,债务期限会延长,而选择银行贷款则企业债务期限会缩短。