Under the Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) model, banks should fully recognize expected lifetime credit losses upon loan origination while gradually recognizing interest revenues. This timelier recognition of losses versus gains (i.e., conditional conservatism) makes banks more capital constrained. To mitigate this, banks may (1) offset timelier credit losses by lowering conservatism in other earnings components and (2) reduce credit losses by demanding greater borrower conservatism. We find that, under CECL, banks increase conservatism in loan losses but decrease conservatism in other earnings components, making overall conservatism only marginally increase. In sharp contrast, their borrowers increase conservatism by 40 percent, and borrowers’ increase is twice that of banks. This substantial spillover effect suggests that, by greatly increasing borrowers’ conservatism, CECL may strengthen debt governance of a broad scope of firms in the economy, thereby having economy-wide consequences beyond the banking industry and potentially enhancing the stability of the entire economy. Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources identified in the study.

We investigate whether foreign institutional investors respond to the sustainability disclosures mandated by the EU’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive and whether disclosure location affects their response. We find that foreign institutions increase ownership in companies affected by the mandate and that the increase is greater in countries that locate the sustainability disclosures within their annual reports, referred to as combined reporting. This is consistent with combined reporting reducing investors’ disclosure processing costs by providing timelier disclosure and better integration of sustainability and financial information. We further find that the increase in ownership is greater in countries that experience a larger increase in the number of firms issuing combined reports, consistent with combined reporting increasing comparability of the sustainability disclosures. Our findings suggest that the location of sustainability reporting plays an important role in cross-border investment decisions, which provides policy implications for the implementation of global sustainability disclosure regulation.