This article studies how the three-way interaction among shareholders, creditors, and managers shapes firms’ executive compensation. Firms with a higher ownership share by “dual holders”—institutional investors that simultaneously hold equity and bond of the company—adopt a less risk-inducing compensation structure: less stock options and more inside debt. Exploiting financial institution mergers that increase or decrease dual ownership for portfolio companies, we identify a causal link between dual ownership and CEO compensation policies. Mutual fund proxy voting data suggest that shareholder voting is an important channel for dual holders to implement less convex contracts.

Using a unique dataset of more than 2 million Chinese firms that received credit from both an important big tech firm (Ant Group) and traditional commercial banks, this paper investigates how different forms of credit correlate with local economic activity, house prices, and firm characteristics. We find that big tech credit does not correlate with local business conditions and house prices when controlling for demand factors, but reacts strongly to changes in firm characteristics, such as transaction volumes and network scores used to calculate firm credit ratings. By contrast, both secured and unsecured bank credit react significantly to local house prices, which incorporate useful information on the environment in which clients operate and on their creditworthiness. This evidence implies that the wider use of big tech credit could reduce the importance of the collateral channel but, at the same time, make lending more reactive to changes in firms’ business activity.