Despite the importance of trade credit as a source of financing there is a significant and persistent decline in this form of short-term borrowing and lending over the 1979 to 2018 interval. We find that the median firm's accounts receivable ratio decreased by 52 percent while accounts payable...

We compare the timeliness of the information signals produced by investor-paid credit rating agencies (Egan and Jones), issuer-paid credit rating agencies (Standard and Poor's), and by sell-side equity analysts, and study the predictive power of this information for the bond and equity markets...

We document a negative causal relationship between changes in the analyst coverage of buying firms and their use of trade credit, thus establishing an "information production" hypothesis of trade credit usage. We show that firms use trade credit to a greater extent when the extent of asymmetric...

We examine the impact of policy uncertainty on trade credit. We document a decline (increase) in accounts payable and receivable during periods of high (low) policy uncertainty. The relation is robust and holds after controlling for endogeneity, economic and political uncertainties, and the...

This paper compares the behavior of standard or issuer-paid rating agencies (represented by Standard & Poor's, S&P) to alternative or investor-paid rating agencies (represented by the Egan and Jones Rating company, EJR) after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act. Results show that both S&P and EJR...

Underscoring the information production, uncertainty reduction, and monitoring effects associated with equity analysts, this paper shows that CEOs at firms with greater analyst coverage exhibit significantly lesser overconfidence in their decisions than their counterparts. We uncover strong...