In this paper, we examine whether cultural biases exist in international syndicated loans. We find that the more positive the perception of trustworthiness that the lender’s country has for the borrower’s country, then the lower the spreads the lender will charge the borrower. We use four...

Using a novel dataset of firm-level perceived trustworthiness from the news media and social media, we find that lending banks charge significantly higher loan spread on firms with lower trustworthiness. Loans to these firms also tend to have shorter loan maturities, more financial covenants,...

We analyze whether the disaggregation quality (DQ) of a borrower's financial statement is associated with its bank loan pricing. We find that firms with low DQ have high bank loan spreads and total cost of borrowing. These results are more pronounced for risky and poorly governed firms....