... lending debt contracting This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read. —Winston Churchill Financial statements enable capital providers to screen investment opportunities and to monitor firms' use of capital. Over the last two decades, however, financial...

...Masako N. Darrough; Mingcherng Deng ABSTRACT We analyze the role of accounting information in debt contracting when the lender has private information that can assist in the borrower's investment decision. The lender might have acquired private information during the due diligence process or via...

...' creditworthiness; this potentially reduces supply-chain lenders' reliance on accounting conservatism in debt contracting. Consistently, we find that suppliers borrowing from supply-chain lenders provide less conservative financial statements than suppliers borrowing from non-supply-chain lenders at loan...

... empirical tests focus on the use of corporate ratings in debt contracting. These tests exclude the during-crisis years to allow time for market participants to observe rating performance during the crisis before making informed usage decisions afterward, as well as to reduce concerns about confounding...

... for conservative accounting, but only a minority of U.S. firms choose these alternative lender monitoring mechanisms. In turn, this suggests that conservatism-facilitated debt contracting appears to be the cost-effective solution to reducing the agency problem of debt for the vast majority of firms. Our study...