We examine the impact of blockholder board representation on a borrower's bank loan contract terms and find it is associated with lower spreads and fewer negative covenants. When examining the potential channels behind the relationship, we find that blockholder-directors who take dedicated monitoring roles, as opposed to the short-term or confrontational positions often associated with activist shareholders, drive the overall relationship. The findings, which are robust to alternative model specifications and explanations, suggest that blockholder-directors can serve as substitute monitors to debtholders when their incentives are aligned. The results also highlight the heterogeneity among blockholders who actively influence the management process.

We examine how bank-specific capital requirements affect banks’ capital ratios and balance sheet composition over the period 1989-2013. We find that higher requirements, even when not binding in a regulatory sense, result in higher bank capital ratios, achieved by a combination of asset contraction, risk reduction and capital raising strategies. We find that after the 2007-09 financial crisis, banks place greater emphasis on raising capital, but that they continue to focus first on raising lower-quality capital. Our results have implications for evaluating the efficacy of bank-specific capital requirements as a policy tool to influence bank balance sheet behavior and resilience.