I study whether the demand for monitoring explains the scope for renegotiation in private debt contracts. Theory suggests that renegotiation trades off the benefits of enhanced monitoring with the costs of creditor intervention. Consistent with this tradeoff, I show that monitoring demand proxies bear a positive association with renegotiation intensity. In contrast, the costs of creditor intervention are associated with less frequent renegotiations. I also find that contractual monitoring mechanisms, such as covenants and concentrated syndicate structures, are positively related to renegotiation intensity. Furthermore, renegotiations transmit new information to the market, in line with private creditors discovering information during renegotiations.

Do accruals-based earnings provide better information about future operating cash flows than do operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework (FASB, 1978)? While this is a foundational issue in accounting, because it addresses the information added by accrual accounting methods, testing it remains unsettled. We show that when comparing the predictive ability of operating cash flows with that of an equivalent earnings measure calculated on an accrual basis, earnings outperform operating cash flows. The result becomes more pronounced when allowance is made for cross-sectional differences in the relation between firms' earnings and future cash flows. In fact, even “bottom line” earnings then have similar explanatory power as operating cash flows.

We provide evidence that financial shocks to lenders influence the composition of financial covenants in debt contracts. Using two distinct measures of lender-specific shocks—defaults in a lender's corporate loan portfolio that occur outside the borrower's region and industry, and non-corporate loan delinquencies—we show that lenders respond to financial shocks by increasing the number and strictness of performance-based but not of capital-based covenants in debt contracts. We examine two possible channels for this result. We find evidence consistent with lenders using stricter control rights because of concerns about capital depletion (a capital channel) and because of new information about lenders' own screening ability (a learning channel). Our results indicate that lender preferences influence how accounting information is used in debt contracts.