Recent years have seen a sharp decline in the use of balance sheet-based covenants in private debt contracts. I hypothesize that changes in accounting standards can explain part of this decline. Standard setting has shifted towards a “balance sheet approach”, which I predict has made the...

This study investigates the effect of the balance sheet approach, where financial reporting focuses on asset and liability valuation, on the usefulness of the capital adequacy ratio in the evaluation of bank default risk by credit rating agencies. We examine Japanese banks, which play the...

Recent years have seen a sharp decline in the use of balance sheet-based covenants in private debt contracts. I hypothesize that changes in accounting standards can explain part of this decline. Standard setting has shifted towards a “balance sheet approach”, which I predict has made the...