The impact of air pollution on the cost of debt financing: Evidence from the bond market

Author(s):  
Jianhua Tan ◽  
Kam C. Chan ◽  
Yining Chen
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-496
Author(s):  
Hongling Guo ◽  
Keping Wu

PurposeThis study aims to investigate how opening high-speed railways affects the cost of debt financing based on China's background.Design/methodology/approachUsing panel data on Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2017, this study constructs a quasi-natural experiment and adopts a difference-in-difference model with multiple time periods to empirically examine the relation between the high-speed railway openings and debt financing cost.FindingsOur results show that opening high-speed railways reduces the cost of debt financing, and this negative correlation is more significant in non-state firms, firms with weaker internal control, and firms that hire non-Big Four auditors. Besides, we explore the impact mechanisms and find that opening high-speed railways improves analyst attention, institutional investor participation, and information disclosure quality, which in turn lowers the cost of debt financing.Research limitations/implicationsThe results imply that the opening of high-speed railways helps to alleviate the information asymmetry and adverse selection between firms and creditors and ultimately reduces the cost of corporate debt financing.Practical implicationsThis paper can inform firms and stakeholders about the impact of opening high-speed railways on debt financing cost: it improves the information environment, reduces the geographical location restrictions of debt financing, ensures the reasonable pricing of corporate debt, and thus promotes the healthy and sound development of the debt market.Originality/valueThis paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence for the impact of infrastructure construction on the information environment of the debt market in China, which enriches the research on the “high-speed railway economy.” In addition, as an exogenous event, the opening of high-speed railways instantly shortens the time distance between firms and external stakeholders, which gives us a natural environment to conduct empirical research, thus providing a new perspective for financial research on firms' geographical location.


2005 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Klock ◽  
Sattar A. Mansi ◽  
William F. Maxwell

AbstractWe examine the relation between the cost of debt financing and a governance index that contains various antitakeover and shareholder protection provisions. Using firm-level data from the Investors Research Responsibility Center for the period 1990–2000, we find that antitakeover governance provisions lower the cost of debt financing. Segmenting the data into firms with the strongest management rights (strongest antitakeover provisions) and firms with the strongest shareholder rights (weakest antitakeover provisions), we find that strong antitakeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt financing while weak antitakeover provisions are associated with a higher cost of debt financing, with a difference of about 34 basis points between the two groups. Overall, the results suggest that antitakeover governance provisions, although not beneficial to stockholders, are viewed favorably in the bond market.


Author(s):  
Nicola Raimo ◽  
Alessandra Caragnano ◽  
Marianna Zito ◽  
Filippo Vitolla ◽  
Massimo Mariani
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 3456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ga-Young Jang ◽  
Hyoung-Goo Kang ◽  
Ju-Yeong Lee ◽  
Kyounghun Bae

This study analyzes the relationship between Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores and bond returns using the corporate bond data in Korea during the period of 2010 to 2015. We find that ESG scores include valuable information about the downside risk of firms. This effect is particularly salient for the firms with high information asymmetry such as small firms. Interestingly, of the three ESG criteria, only environmental scores show a significant impact on bond returns when interacted with the firm size, suggesting that high environmental scores lower the cost of debt financing for small firms. Finally, ESG is complementary to credit ratings in assessing credit quality as credit ratings cannot explain away ESG effects in predicting future bond returns. This result suggests that credit rating agencies should either integrate ESG scores into their current rating process or produce separate ESG scores which bond investors integrate with the existing credit ratings by themselves.


2019 ◽  
pp. 0148558X1988731
Author(s):  
Norio Kitagawa ◽  
Akinobu Shuto

Prior studies have indicated that earnings are useful for bond market investors and that beating earnings benchmarks is related to a firm’s lower cost of debt. This study examines whether management earnings forecasts are related to a firm’s cost of debt. Our results indicate that (a) positive forecast innovations (i.e., forecasted increases in earnings) are related to a firm’s lower bond yield spread after controlling for the effect of other earnings benchmarks and (b) the negative association between positive forecast innovations and bond yield spread is weaker for firms with high default risk than for those with low default risk. The results suggest that management earnings forecasts are useful for investors in the Japanese bond market and are consistent with the findings in the equity market. However, the usefulness of management earnings forecasts in the bond market depends on a firm’s level of default risk. Our results suggest that bond investors discount the management earnings forecasts of firms with high default risk because such forecasts are more likely to have an optimistic bias.


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