This paper examines the relation between the corporate life cycle and lending spreads. Using a sample of 20,307 firm-loan observations spanning 5,076 publicly traded U.S. firms, we find that lending spreads follow a U-shape pattern across the life cycle phases. This pattern is in addition to the...

Masulis and Mobbs (2014, 2015) find that independent directors with multiple directorships allocate their monitoring effort unequally based on a directorship's relative prestige. We investigate whether bank loan contract terms reflect such unequal allocation of directors' monitoring effort. We...

In a cross-country setting, we document that stronger religiosity is associated with lower loan interest spread. In addition, we show that this negative association is more pronounced in countries with weaker creditor rights, suggesting that religious values play a more significant role in...

We examine the effects of audit quality on earnings management and cost of equity capital for two groups of Chinese firms: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs). The differences in the nature of the ownership, agency relations and bankruptcy risks lead SOEs to...