Loan Sales and the Cost of Corporate Borrowing

When a loan is sold, it goes to a lower-cost financing sourcethan its originator. Yet, lending markets are less than perfectlycompetitive. Despite the lower funding cost, therefore, theloan price is not necessarily more favorable to the borrower.However, corporate borrowers are averse to the participationof their loans to other lenders because of the complexity ofdealing with multiple banks and the potential information costsof the sale announcement. Consequently, I conjecture that theborrower extracts a price concession in exchange for allowingthe bank to sell participations in the loan. Using a hand-matcheddataset of loans, borrowers, and lenders, I find that the averageyield spread on loans originated by active loan sellers is about20 basis points lower than the average spread on loans originatedby moderate loan sellers.     

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.     

Is the Corporate Loan Market Globally Integrated? A Pricing Puzzle

We offer evidence that interest rate spreads on syndicated loans to corporate borrowers are economically significantly smaller in Europe than in the United States, other things equal. Differences in borrower, loan, and lender characteristics do not appear to explain this phenomenon. Borrowers overwhelmingly issue in their natural home market and bank portfolios display home bias. This may explain why pricing discrepancies are not competed away, though their causes remain a puzzle. Thus, important determinants of loan origination market outcomes remain to be identified, home bias appears to be material for pricing, and corporate financing costs differ across Europe and the United States.     

基于借贷行为基本次序的农村金融模式选择:借贷成本的角度

随着我国金融体制改革进程的加快,农村金融改革将进一步深化.本文基于农户借贷行为的基本次序,从借贷成本的角度对友情借贷、合作金融和商业金融进行了综合分析,结果显示,在农户友情借贷全面放开的基础上,我国农村应建立并完善以合作金融为基础,商业金融、政策性金融协调发展的综合型金融服务体系.     

Financial Restatements, Cost of Debt and Information Spillover: Evidence From the Secondary Loan Market

Abstract:  In this paper, we investigate the effect of financial restatements on the debt market. Specifically, we focus on the secondary loan market, which has become one of the largest capital markets in the US, and ask the following: (1) whether financial restatements increase restating firm's cost of debt financing and (2) whether the information about restatements arrives at the secondary loan market earlier than at the stock market? Using 176 restatement data, we find significant negative abnormal loan returns and increased bid-ask spreads around restatement announcements. Furthermore, this negative loan market reaction is more pronounced when the restatement is initiated by either the SEC or auditors, and when the primary reason for restatement is related to revenue recognition issues. Additionally, we find restatement information arrives at the secondary loan market earlier than at the equity market, and that such private information quickly flows into the equity market. We also show that stock prices begin to decline approximately 30 days prior to the restatement announcements for firms with traded loans. However, we do not find such informational leakage for firms without traded loans. Collectively, the results of this paper suggest: (1) increased cost of debt financing after restatements and (2) superior informational efficiency of the secondary loan market to the stock market.     

The Effect of Corporate Status on External Audit Fees: Evidence From the UK

Abstract:  This paper simultaneously examines, for the first time, the determinants of external audit fees of UK companies drawn from the quoted sector (Main Market, the Alternative Investment Market and Ofex), and the unquoted sector (public and private limited companies). The paper also provides new evidence on the effects of corporate failure and the persistence of the big four and mid-tier auditor premiums across the public and private corporate sectors. After controlling for firm size, audit risk and complexity, we find that quoted and unquoted public limited companies have significantly higher audit fees than their private limited counterparts. Our estimates imply that relative premiums for market/corporate form are as follows: Main Market over AIM, 6.8%; AIM over Ofex, 19.5%; Ofex over unquoted plc, 15.5%; and unquoted plc over private, 16.7%. However, despite indications in prior US research to the contrary, we find no evidence that insolvent firms that failed were charged higher audit fees in the year preceding failure. A positive relationship is also found between audit and consultancy fees – a result that persists using an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity.     

The Corporate Cost of Capital and the Return on Corporate Investment

We estimate the internal rates of return earned by nonfinancial firms on (i) the initial market values of their securities and (ii) the cost of their investments. The return on value is an estimate of the overall corporate cost of capital. The estimate of the real cost of capital for 1950–96 is 5.95 percent. The real return on cost is larger, 7.38 percent, so on average corporate investment seems to be profitable. A by-product of calculating these returns is information about the history of corporate earnings, investment, and financing decisions that is perhaps more interesting than the returns.     

Corporate Governance and Audit Fees: Evidence of Countervailing Relations

This study documents that audit fees, and hence audit quality, and governance reflect two countervailing relations, namely, a fee increase because of exogenous changes in expected liability that require greater auditing and other mechanisms to attain better governance, and a fee reduction because auditors reduce the price of risk to reflect the benefits of better governance. The study period provides an interesting setting to test these relations because it covers the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which imposed a substantial cost on many companies to strengthen governance, including increased auditing and internal control spending. Yet, after controlling for such increased spending, our results also suggest that better governance reduces the cost of auditing.     

The Economic Impact of Herd Behavior in the Japanese Loan Market

This paper investigates whether inefficient herd behavior of Japanese financial institutions in the domestic loan market affected the real economy during the period between 1975 and 1999. By using Japanese loan data, arranged by geographical area, we show that loans stemming from inefficient herd behavior of Japanese financial institutions tended to have destabilizing effects on the GDP and land prices in the following years, while ordinary loans of those financial institutions had a more positive impact. Our results indicate that the deterioration of the real economy in the 1990s may have been attributable partly to the inefficient herd behavior in the Japanese loan market during the period of the economic bubble in the late 1980s.     

Subsidizing Liquidity: The Impact of Make/Take Fees on Market Quality

Facing increased competition over the last decade, many stock exchanges changed their trading fees to maker‐taker pricing, an incentive scheme that rewards liquidity suppliers and charges liquidity demanders. Using a change in trading fees on the Toronto Stock Exchange, we study whether and why the breakdown of trading fees between liquidity demanders and suppliers matters. Posted quotes adjust after the change in fee composition, but the transaction costs for liquidity demanders remain unaffected once fees are taken into account. However, as posted bid‐ask spreads decline, traders (particularly retail) use aggressive orders more frequently, and adverse selection costs decrease.     

民间金融高利率成因：基于借款成本的分析

民间金融利率是民间金融的核心问题。我国许多地区的民间金融利率,均呈现出与正规金融机构贷款利率一致的变动趋势,但二者间始终存在巨大的利差。通过引入“借款成本”概念,说明民间金融利率不仅需要参考正规金融机构贷款利率,还要包含借款人事受正规利率所需付出的“借款成本”,进而构建局部均衡模型,说明借款成本影响借款人决策,并提出有效降低借款成本的建议。     

个人住房抵押贷款市场的机构组成

本文通过各方资料收集,归纳了构成个人住房抵押贷款业务链的主要环节及其收益和风险特征,介绍了美国个人住房抵押贷款市场的主要参与机构,分析了不同类型的机构在不同业务环节的优势和劣势,以此为我国个人住房抵押贷款市场的业务细分和机构组成提供参考。     

The Empirical Average Cost of Capital: A New Approach to Estimating the Cost of Corporate Funds

The authors develop a new way to measure the cost of capital, called the empirical average cost of capital (or “EACC”), which is consistent with existing methods of calculating the weighted average cost of capital, but uses information from the firm's financial statements and requires fewer and less subjective inputs. The authors’ model relies on the concept of economic profit while using data from the period 1990‐2012 on net operating profits and total capital to estimate the EACC at both the individual company and industry‐wide levels. Estimates of the EACC and rolling quarterly forecasts of future net operating profits for a single company, McDonald's, for its related industry, and for 57 other U.S. industries are compared to five conventional “textbook” estimates of the weighted average cost of capital published by Ibbotson Associates. The authors find that the EACC yields forecasts of future net operating profit after taxes that compare favorably to those of the five published measures of the weighted average cost of capital, as well as the average and median of these measures.     

The Total Cost of Transactions on the NYSE

This paper develops a measure of execution costs (market impact) of transactions on the NYSE. The measure is the volume-weighted average price over the trading day. It yields results that are less biased than measures that use single prices, such as closes. The paper then applies this measure to a data set containing more than 14,000 actual trades. We show that total transaction costs, commission plus market impact costs, average twenty-three basis points of principal value for our sample. Commission costs, averaging eighteen basis points, are considerably higher than execution costs, which average five basis points. They vary slightly across brokers and significantly across money managers. Though brokers do not incur consistently high or low transaction costs, money managers experience persistently high or lost costs. Finally, the paper explores the possible tradeoff between commission expenditures and market impact costs. Paying higher commissions does not yield commensurately lower execution costs, even after adjusting for trade difficulty. We cannot determine whether other valuable brokerage services are being purchased with higher commission payments or whether some money managers really are inefficient consumers of brokerage trading services.     

The Informational Efficiency of the Equity Market As Compared to the Syndicated Bank Loan Market

The loan market is a hybrid between a public and a private market, comprised of financial institutions with access to private information about borrowing firms. We test whether this is reflected in informationally efficient price formation in the loan market vis-a-vis the equity markets, and reject this private information hypothesis. We also reject a liquidity hypothesis which suggests that equity markets always lead loan markets, despite bank lenders' access to private information, because of greater liquidity in equity markets. We further test, and reject, an asymmetric price reaction hypothesis that states that loan returns are more sensitive to negative information whereas equity returns respond symmetrically to both positive and negative information. We find evidence most consistent with an integrated markets hypothesis that suggests that both the equity and syndicated bank loan markets are highly integrated such that information flows freely across markets. This is particularly true when the equity market makers are also loan syndicate members.      

Corporate Loan Securitization and the Standardization of Financial Covenants

We examine whether syndicated loans securitized through collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have more standardized financial covenants. We proxy for the standardization of covenants using the textual similarity of their contractual definitions. We find that securitized loans are associated with higher covenant standardization than nonsecuritized institutional loans. In addition, we show that CLOs with more diverse or frequently rebalanced portfolios are more likely to purchase loans with standardized covenants, potentially because standardization alleviates information processing costs related to loan monitoring and screening. We also document that covenant standardization is associated with greater loan and CLO note rating agreement between credit rating agencies, further supporting the relation between lower information costs and covenant standardization. Overall, our study provides evidence that loan securitization is related to the design of standardized financial covenants.     

Underpricing in the Corporate Bond Market

This article examines underpricing of initial public offerings(IPOs) and seasoned offerings in the corporate bond market.We investigate whether underpricing represents a solution toan information problem or a liquidity problem. We find thatunderpricing occurs with both IPOs and seasoned offerings andis highest among riskier, unknown firms. Our evidence suggeststhat information problems drive underpricing, with support forboth the bookbuilding view of underpricing and the asymmetricinformation theory. We do not find evidence in favor of theRock model of underpricing or any evidence that illiquiditycauses underpricing.     

If at First You Don't Succeed: The Effect of the Option to Resolicit on Corporate Takeovers

This article models, and experimentally simulates, the free-riderproblem in a takeover when the raider has the option to "resolicit,"that is, to make a new offer after an offer has been rejected.In theory, the option to resolicit, by lowering offer credibility,increases the dissipative losses associated with free riding.The outcomes of our experiment support this prediction and producelosses from free riding even higher than theoretically predicted.These dissipation losses reduce raider gains to less than 3%of synergy value of the acquisition     

The Informational Efficiency of the Corporate Bond Market: An Intraday Analysis

Using a unique dataset based on daily and hourly high-yieldbond transaction prices, we find the informational efficiencyof corporate bond prices is similar to that of the underlyingstocks. We find that stocks do not lead bonds in reflectingfirm-specific information. We further examine price behavioraround earnings news and find that information is quickly incorporatedinto both bond and stock prices, even at short return horizons.Finally, we find that measures of market quality are no poorerfor the bonds in our sample than for the underlying stocks.