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Working Paper
EBITDA Add-backs in Debt Contracting: A Step Too Far?
Financial covenants in syndicated loan agreements often rely on definitions of EBITDA that deviate from the GAAP definition. We document the increased usage of non-GAAP addbacks toEBITDA in recent times. Using the 2013 Interagency Guidance on Leveraged Lending, which we argue led to an exogenous increase in non-GAAP EBITDA addbacks, we show that these addbacksincrease the likelihood of loan delinquency and default, and also increase the likelihood of the borrower experiencing a ratings downgrade. Greater use of non-GAAP EBITDA addbacks also makes it more likely that lead arrangers lower their ...
Working Paper
Social Capital and Mortgages
Using comprehensive mortgage-level data, we discover that the social capital of the community in which households live positively influences the likelihood of the approval of their mortgage applications, the terms of approved mortgages, and the subsequent performance of those mortgages. The results hold when conditioning on extensive household and community characteristics and a battery of fixed effects, including individual effects, data permitting, and when employing instrumental variables and propensity score matching to address identification and selection concerns. Concerning causal ...
Report
Specialization in Banking
Using highly detailed data on the loan portfolios of large U.S. banks, we document that these banks "specialize" by concentrating their lending disproportionately into one industry. This specialization improves a bank’s industry-specific knowledge and allows it to offer generous loan terms to borrowers, especially to firms with access to alternate sources of funding and during periods of greater nonbank lending. Superior industry-specific knowledge is further reflected in better loan and, ultimately, bank performance. Banks concentrate more on their primary industry in times of instability ...