We examine the impact of liberal judge ideology, as an exogenous proxy for litigation risk, on firms' choice of debt structure. In line with the substitution of governance mechanisms hypothesis, we find that U.S. firms headquartered in circuits dominated by liberal judges rely less on bank debt financing. We also show that the substitution away from bank borrowing arising from liberal judge ideology leads to a greater reliance on other financing alternatives, such as public debt and equity financing. Additional analyses indicate that the effect of liberal judge ideology is amplified for firms operating in competitive markets, firms facing tighter financial constraints, and firms with more growth opportunities. The governance substitution effect is, however, less pronounced for firms with higher institutional ownership. Overall, our findings suggest that, by exacerbating litigation risk, liberal judge ideology induces firms to trade-off creditor governance stemming from bank debt with governance by litigation, thus decreasing their reliance on bank debt in favor of alternative financing sources with less strict constraints and lower monitoring of managerial behavior.

Using a large panel of U.S. public firms, we examine the relation between annual report readability and cost of equity capital. We hypothesize that complex textual reporting deters investors' ability to process and interpret annual reports, leading to higher information risk, and thus higher cost of equity financing. Consistent with our prediction, we find that greater textual complexity is associated with higher cost of equity capital. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, including use of multiple estimation methods, alternative proxies of annual report readability and cost of equity capital measures, and potential endogeneity concerns. In addition, we hypothesize and test whether the nature of the relation between readability and cost of capital depends on the tone of 10-K filings. Our results show that the effect of annual report complexity on cost of equity is greater when disclosure tone is more negative or more ambiguous. We also find that the effect of annual report readability on cost of equity capital depends on the degree of stock market competition, level of institutional investors' ownership, and analyst coverage.