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The Accounting Review Vol. 94 No. 4 2019

The Effect of Information Opacity and Accounting Irregularities on Personal Lending Relationships: Evidence from Lender and Manager Co-Migration

Urooj Khan1; Xinlei Li2; Christopher D. Williams3; Regina Wittenberg-Moerman4

1 Columbia University · 2 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · 3 University of Michigan · 4 University of Southern California

Abstract

We examine how personal lending relationships between lenders and managers are affected by information and accounting environments of borrowing firms. We address this question by exploring whether, following managerial turnover, lenders migrate with the manager from the firm where a relationship developed (origin firm) to the manager's new firm (destination firm). We find that the opacity of the external information environment of the destination firm significantly increases the probability of lenders' co-migration, while accounting irregularities at both the destination and origin firms decrease it. We also show that co-migration is affected by a lender's monitoring efficiency. A lender's monitoring efficiency increases its co-migration probability when a manager moves to an opaque firm, but not when she moves to a transparent one. When the destination or origin firm experiences accounting irregularities, even lenders with strong monitoring capabilities are mostly reluctant to continue their relationship with a migrating manager.

DOI
10.2308/accr-52287
Volume
94
Issue
4
Pages
303-344
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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