Knowledge that Transforms

Is bank financing compatible with innovation? We show that an exogenous enhancement in the value of borrowers’ patents, either through greater patent protection or creditor rights over collateral, results in cheaper loans. Using regression discontinuity design, we show that although R&D investment sharply drops following a financial covenant violation, the reduction is concentrated in firms with less productive R&D. Consequently, R&D reduction does not impair innovative output. Our results suggest that the property rights that patents confer to intellectual property and to lenders’ judicious exercise of control rights allow bank loans to be a viable means of financing for innovative firms.

– Since corporate debt tends to be riskier in recessions, transfers from equity holders to debt holders that accompany corporate decisions also tend to concentrate in recessions. Such systematic risk exposures of debt overhang have important implications for corporate investment and financing decisions, and for the ex ante costs of debt overhang. Using a calibrated dynamic capital structure model, we show that the costs of debt overhang become higher in the presence of macroeconomic risk. We also provide several new predictions on how the cyclicality of a firm’s assets in place and growth options affect its investment and capital structure decisions.

In this paper, we build a simple formal model of cash holdings that can explain this and other empirical regularities. Our model is based on the well-known “lemons” problem associated with equity issuance. We show that firms with poor growth opportunities and those with excellent opportunities will not hold excess cash, whereas firms with opportunities in the middle range will hold excess cash. We derive empirical implications relating excess cash to the extent of asymmetric information, growth opportunities, value of assets in place, and cash holding costs. Received March 29, 2017; editorial decision June 12, 2017 by Editor Uday Rajan.