Going public reduces information asymmetry between a firm’s incumbent and potential new lenders. However, we show that while loan spreads are lower in post-IPO loans due to increased lender competition, the likelihood of having interest-increasing performance-pricing, which automatically increases spreads if firm performance deteriorates, is substantially heightened, only for loans from new lenders. This indicates that new lenders remain skeptical despite a more “level playing field.” Newly public firms need to commit to performance-sensitive debt to convince outside lenders, despite gaining a credible mechanism to disseminate information to them. Pricing grids do get amended more often ex-post for such loans, reflecting a lender learning process. Newly public firms are indeed still more likely to obtain loans from new lenders post-IPO. Our results suggest that performance pricing can serve to address the remaining information gap with new lenders beyond hard-information disclosure, allowing firms to better diversify their lender base.

We investigate the resilience of the South African banking sector by applying a dynamic agent-based model and the DebtRank algorithm. In contrast to previous studies focusing on listed banks, our methodology includes both listed and non-listed institutions that make up the banking industry, thereby capturing the systemic importance and vulnerability of all banks within the interbank market network. Our findings indicate that while larger banks exhibit greater systemic importance, a statistically significant correlation exists between a bank’s interbank-lending-to-equity ratio and vulnerability. Moreover, a bank’s size and specific interbank activities influence its systemic contribution, both in terms of importance and vulnerability. These insights offer policymakers an empirically grounded framework for improving financial stability monitoring and risk mitigation efforts.

We find that a borrower default causes an increase in investors' EDGAR searches for non-defaulting borrowers that share the same relationship bank. This effect is more pronounced when the lending relationship between the defaulting borrower and the defaulted-upon bank is stronger and when the reliance of non-defaulting borrowers on the defaulted-upon bank is greater. The co-movement of information acquisition for non-defaulting borrowers increases after the peer default, which leads to a co-movement in the issuance of management forecasts and a co-movement in stock returns. In sum, our research supports a network effect of peer defaults on information acquisition.