We document that a firm's culture — specifically, its religiosity — affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions....

We examine whether climate-change risk affects firms' cost of capital when firms canadapt to the risk. We find firms' cost of long-term loans increases with sea level rise(SLR) risk, but this effect mainly holds among firms with high adjustment costs to therisk, i.e., firms for whom it is hard...

Implicit guarantees provided by financial intermediaries are important in China. We argue theoretically that project screening by financial intermediaries, accompanied by their implicit guarantees to investors, can be the second-best arrangement. It can also mitigate capital misallocation that...