This study examines the effect of litigation risk and litigation costs on firms’ credit ratings and debt financing. The results show that litigation affects a firm's creditworthiness and debt costs in two stages. Before a lawsuit filing, firms at higher risk of litigation have lower credit ratings, are more likely to be rated speculative grade, pay higher yields on loans and bonds, and are less likely to rely on debt financing. At the time of the lawsuit resolution, settlement costs have an additional effect on firm credit quality. Companies facing larger settlement disbursements in relation to their available cash experience a decline in credit ratings and an increase in yield spread. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns and different proxies of litigation risk.

This paper examines the impact of credit default swaps (CDS) on firms' financing and trade credit policies. Our results indicate firms with CDS trading on their debt increase their equity issuances. Further, firms with CDS trading on their debt and high levels of long-term debt issuances decrease their debt financing. Total and idiosyncratic risks are also higher for firms with CDS trading on their debt. These firms pay their suppliers and collect from their customers quicker. Thus, the impacts of the CDS market are not limited to the borrowing firms but also affect economically connected firms.

It is well known that unless worker-firm match quality is controlled for, reduced-form estimates of returns to firm tenure will be biased. In this paper, we show that there is a further pervasive source of bias, namely, the comovement of firm employment and firm wages. We argue that firm-year fixed effects must be used to eliminate this bias. Estimates from two large-panel data sets from Germany and Portugal show that the bias is empirically important. Finally, we show that the results extend to tenure correlates used in macroeconomics, such as the minimum unemployment rate since joining the firm.

Rating agencies produce ratings used by investors, but obtain most of their revenue from issuers, leading to a conflict of interest. We employ a unique data set on the use of non-rating services, and the associated payments, in India, to test if this conflict affects ratings quality. Agencies rate issuers that pay them for non-rating services higher (than agencies not hired for such services). Such issuers also have higher default rates. Both effects are increasing in the amount paid. These results suggest that issuers which hire agencies for non-rating services receive higher ratings despite having higher default risk.

The media can impose reputational costs on firms because of its important role as an information intermediary and its ability to negatively slant coverage. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment that holds constant the information event across firms but varies the availability of a major news outlet in local markets. We find that firms subject to the threat of slanted coverage suppress the release of negative information before the event and release it subsequently. Our results are consistent with theory on the active role firms can play in managing their reputational capital through anticipatory actions to avoid negative media coverage.

ABSTRACT We examine whether syndicated loans securitized through collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have more standardized financial covenants. We proxy for the standardization of covenants using the textual similarity of their contractual definitions. We find that securitized loans are associated with higher covenant standardization than nonsecuritized institutional loans. In addition, we show that CLOs with more diverse or frequently rebalanced portfolios are more likely to purchase loans with standardized covenants, potentially because standardization alleviates information processing costs related to loan monitoring and screening. We also document that covenant standardization is associated with greater loan and CLO note rating agreement between credit rating agencies, further supporting the relation between lower information costs and covenant standardization. Overall, our study provides evidence that loan securitization is related to the design of standardized financial covenants.

We propose a theory of intertemporal choice that is robust to specific assumptions on the discount rate. One class of models requires that one utility stream be chosen over another if and only if its discounted value is higher for all discount factors in a set. Another model focuses on an average discount factor. Yet another model is pessimistic, and evaluates a flow by the lowest available discounted value.

Documenting the US antitrust review process for M&As in rich detail, we unveil that regulatory costs and risks are significant and that mitigating these risks via lobbying by acquirers may benefit shareholders. Our results show that an adverse antitrust review outcome leads to a decline of 2.8% in acquirer firm value. Further, we show that lobbying before deal announcements is associated with more favorable review outcomes. Finally, higher pre-announcement lobbying is valued by shareholders, especially in horizontal deals and deals with a larger expected change in market concentration, which have higher antitrust concerns. However, this positive value effect of lobbying applies only in firms with strong corporate governance. Our results highlight the role of political connections and lobbying for corporate investments when facing regulatory costs and risks.