We provide evidence that a firm's exposure to industry downturns, what we refer to as industry risk, is an important factor affecting ex post recovery rates and ex ante bank loan pricing and the borrowing firms use of cash. The basic idea is that if it is costly to redeploy industry assets, then...

Past studies find that commercial loan spreads are “sticky,” in the sense that they do not fully respond to changes in market rates or observable firm credit risk characteristics. In this paper, we provide evidence that the appearance of stickiness arises, in part, because the intensity of...