Do banks react to earnings quality in a privately-dominated context?

Purpose Taking into account that debtholders bear most of the risks in the case of failure (Jensen and Meckling, 1976), earnings quality is valuable for debtholder decision makers as a monitoring mechanism and as a signal of credibility that reduces information asymmetries. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze whether banks carry out an earnings quality analysis in their lending decision processes and, in particular, how carefully they do it. Design/methodology/approach The authors focus on data from pre-bankruptcy companies because both earnings management and the potential costs faced by auditors increase considerably during the process towards failure. To test the hypotheses, the authors run separate multivariate regressions of price (cost of debt) and non-price (credit availability) lending decisions on different proxies for earnings quality. The authors use Big N and modified audit reports as a proxy for audit quality. Additionally, they use discretionary accruals as a proxy of accounting numbers quality. Findings The results show that banks do consider their borrowers’ quality of earnings, but they do it quite cursorily, that is, without taking advantage of all the possibilities offered by an effective combination of external and internal proxies. Research limitations/implications The inferences apply only to financially distressed private firms, so they are not generalizable to other contexts with low ownership concentration or with a less severe risk of failure. Practical implications The language used by the auditors in the audit report, particularly in generally accepted accounting principles violations, might not be clear enough for the user to undo the specific distortions in the financial statements. Originality/value The authors provide evidence of how banks incorporate earnings quality into their lending decisions, prior research has analyzed them either separately or from an equity market perspective. Moreover, the authors also add to the debt-covenant literature by explicitly showing that manipulation helps managers to achieve better lending conditions.