Narrow Results

The Paris Agreement signals increased climate awareness and potential changes in the business environment as an economy decarbonizes. Ratification of the Paris Agreement could heighten climate-related transition risks, especially for companies in high-emitting industries. This research analyzes the impact of Paris Agreement ratification on the debt financing decisions of publicly listed companies in Southeast Asian economies. Our empirical evidence shows that, after announcement of Paris Agreement ratification, firms in high-emitting industries have leverage and financial leverage that are an average of 1.8% and 4.2% lower, respectively, than firms in low-emitting industries. Firms in the region also witnessed higher risks 2 years after ratification, and these risks do not differ significantly between high- and low-emitting industries. This finding implies that firms become riskier under heightened transition risks, and this influences their financial decisions. Governments might thus consider introducing policies that facilitate their response to a low-carbon transition.

We examine the impact of Level 3 assets held by nonfinancial companies on credit risk. Specifically, we investigate how the pricing uncertainty of Level 3 assets is reflected in credit ratings, corporate bond yield spreads, and incidences of bond covenants. We find that higher holdings of Level 3 assets are associated with lower credit ratings, higher yield spreads, especially for Level 3 assets sample, and incidences of bondholder-friendly covenants in the bond issues. Our findings are robust to the treatment of sample selection bias and the influence of macroeconomic factors. In addition, our direct test on the relation between the holdings of Level 3 assets and a firm’s distance-to-default shows that higher holdings of Level 3 assets reduce a firm’s distance-to-default. Overall, our findings support the view that Level 3 assets are perceived as increasing credit risk in the bond market.

This paper investigates the impact of the voluntary adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by unlisted firms on both their financial reporting quality and cost of debt. Using a large international sample of unlisted EU companies for which the choice of IFRS is voluntary, we find that IFRS adoption has a positive impact on financial reporting quality and results in a decrease in the cost of debt. In addition, unlisted firms adopting IFRS are more likely to be acquired or go public in the years subsequent to the adoption, relative to other unlisted firms. We document a tangible benefit of voluntary IFRS adoption by unlisted firms.

This study examines the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance on firms’ cost of debt (COD). Based on a sample of 18,950 firm-year observations from 41 countries over the period of 2008–2015, we find a significant negative association between aggregate ESG performance and firms’ COD. We also observe a significant negative association between the individual ESG performance factors (E, S, and G) and firms’ COD. In addition, the negative association between aggregate/individual ESG performance and firms’ COD is economically significant, ranging from 16.93% to 21.20% of median COD values. Finally, disclosure of ESG performance, stakeholder orientation, investor protection, control of corruption, and social progress have pronounced effects on the negative association between ESG performance and firms’ COD. Taken together, our results suggest that ESG performance has a significant negative effect on firms’ COD from an international perspective.

Existing studies have documented a negative relationship between the GIM corporate governance index (which contains anti-takeover provisions) and the corporate cost of debt, which implies that fewer anti-takeover provisions may lead to a larger shareholder expropriation of bondholder wealth. That is, strong corporate governance hurts bondholders (asset substitution hypothesis). However, another stream of research asserts that governance mechanisms may benefit bondholders by paring down agency costs and decreasing information asymmetry between the firm and the lenders (monitoring hypothesis). We reexamine this issue by considering the self-selection effect. We find that both hypotheses can be true, and that firms consider the reduction of cost of debt when self-selecting their governance, and the cost of debt would have been much higher had the alternative governance decision been made.