Anti-recharacterization laws significantly increase the rights of securitization creditors by allowing the buyers of securitized assets to exclusively and immediately seize collateral in bankruptcy. However, strengthening the rights of securitization creditors can limit other creditors’ ability to recover loans. We find that, after a state adopts an anti-recharacterization law, local banks operating in the same state accrue more loan loss provisions, tighten their loan contracts, and incur higher future loan charge-offs. These findings are consistent with the argument that a safe harbor for securitization transactions advantages Wall Street-style structured finance at the expense of Main Street-style lending.

Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) increases the cost of raising equity capital, especially when the economy is weak. A one standard deviation increase in the EPU index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) is associated with a 43 basis point increase in the price discount of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) during the 2000−2014 period. The cross-sectional analysis shows that the EPU effect on SEO discounts is stronger for firms with greater dependence on government spending, less informative stock price, or a smaller EPU beta. Moreover, there are fewer SEO activities in periods when there is a high degree of policy uncertainty.

We examine whether private firm disclosure affects the price that public firms pay for their bank loans. Using global data on syndicated loans, we find that private firm disclosure significantly reduces public firms’ loan spreads. This finding supports a positive information externalities view whereby private firm disclosure helps banks evaluate public borrowers’ credit risk within the industry context and reduces information asymmetry between banks and borrowers. Consistent with this mechanism, we find larger reductions in public firms’ loan spreads when banks have less information about the borrower or lower expected monitoring intensity, when public-firm borrowers are more informationally opaque, when private firms have greater economic importance in the industry, when private and public firms are more economically similar, or when a larger share of private firms in an industry have audited financial statements. We show that private firm disclosure generates positive externalities for the loan market by reducing information asymmetry.