Syndicated Loan Announcements and the Market Value of the Banking Firm.

This paper examines valuation effects on the stocks of fifteen participating money-center banks of 774 announcements of syndicated loans, representing announcements of investment decisions for the lenders. The authors find that announcements of LDC loans in the 1970s, especially those to Latin American borrowers, are associated with negative abnormal returns to the lending banks while announcements of loans to U.S. corporate borrowers in the 1980s, especially those for takover finance, are associated with positive abnormal returns. While a number of testable predictions are consistent with the negative abnormal returns for Latin American loans, they explain response to takeover loans with a return-to-liquidity hypothesis. Copyright 1995 by Ohio State University Press.