دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تاثیر تخصص صنعتی حسابرس بر بهای وام بانکی - امرالد 2017

Introduction

We examine the association between auditor industry specialization and features of loan contracts including interest rates, the number of covenants and the likelihood of collateral. Over the past two decades, US firms have come to rely on bank loans as a key source of external financing. At times, the amount of bank loan financing was larger than the total amount of equity and bond financing 1 . But since firms may be hesitant to provide complete and accurate information when applying for financing, banks face an adverse selection problem when making loans. Reducing information asymmetry between banks and borrowers can mitigate adverse selection. Previous literature points out that accounting information can resolve information asymmetry and thus alleviate the adverse selection problem in loan contracting (Smith and Warner 1979;Watts and Zimmerman 1978, 1986, 1990; Armstrong, Guay and Weber 2010, etc). For instance, covenants associated with loan contracts are often based on accounting information about working capital or debt-to-equity ratios. In fact, banks are likely to strengthen price and non-price loan terms if borrowers provide poor quality accounting information (Bharath, Sunder and Sunder 2008).

Conclusion

In this study, we examine whether auditor industry expertise affects features of bank loans. We expect that industry specialist auditors have a better ability to detect intentional and unintentional accounting errors, helping to ensure that banks can rely on the accounting information to predict future cash flows and assess borrowers' ability to repay the principal and interests. Banks may also reduce loan-related contracting costs and monitoring costs based on better accounting information. Accordingly, banks have more trust in firms that retain industry specialists and offer loan contracts with more favorable price and non-price terms. Our empirical results support our expectations. After controlling for firm and loan characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, industry and year effects, our regression analyses show that increased auditor industry expertise is related to lower loan spreads. In addition, increased auditor industry expertise is associated with a smaller number of covenants and a lower likelihood of a loan being secured by collateral. These findings are supported by firm-level regressions, regressions excluding firms with multiple facilities, regressions by industries, Heckman two-stage regressions, the propensity-score matching approach, regressions using alternative specialist proxies, and regressions considering auditor changes.