Search Results
Working Paper
Financial Crises and the Composition of Cross-Border Lending
We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans. We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures, which account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures, increased during the global financial crisis due to large drawdowns on credit lines extended before the crisis. Our empirical analysis of the drivers of cross-border loan exposures in a large bilateral dataset leads to three main results. First, banks with lower levels of capital favor syndicated over other kinds of ...
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
The U.S. Syndicated Loan Market : Matching Data
We introduce a new software package for determining linkages between datasets without common identifiers. We apply these methods to three datasets commonly used in academic research on syndicated lending: Refinitiv LPC DealScan, the Shared National Credit Database, and S&P Global Market Intelligence Compustat. We benchmark the results of our match using results from the literature and previously matched files that are publicly available. We find that the company level matching is enhanced by careful cleaning of the data and considering hierarchical relationships. For loan level matching, a ...
Journal Article
Do Adverse Oil Price Shocks Change Loan Contract Terms for Energy Firms?
This article examined whether the relationship between creditworthiness and loan spreads for energy firms in the syndicated loan market changed after the 2014 oil-price shock. {{p}} The authors use syndicated loans, which are jointly funded by several financial institutions, because the syndicated loan market is a major source of debt financing for oil firms. Credit conditions tightened following the oil-price shock in mid-2014.
Newsletter
How central bank swap lines affect the leveraged loan market
The cost of borrowing U.S. dollars through foreign exchange (FX) swap markets increased significantly at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, indicated by larger deviations from covered interest rate parity (CIP). CIP deviations narrowed again when the Federal Reserve expanded its swap lines to support U.S. dollar liquidity globally—by enhancing and extending its swap facility with foreign central banks and introducing the new temporary Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities. ...
Working Paper
Industrial Composition of Syndicated Loans and Banks’ Climate Commitments
In the past two decades, a number of banks joined global initiatives aimed to mitigate climate change by “greening” their asset portfolios. We study whether banks that made such commitments have a different emission exposure of their portfolios of syndicated loans than banks that did not. We rely on loan-level information with global coverage combined with country-industry information on emissions. We find that all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years. However, we do not find differences between banks that did and those that did not signal their ...
Working Paper
What Do Lead Banks Learn from Leveraged Loan Investors?
In leveraged loan deals, lead banks use bookbuilding to extract price-relevant information from syndicate participants. This paper examines the content of such information. We find that pricing adjustments during bookbuilding are highly informative, not only about investors’ required risk premium but also about borrower quality. A one-percentage-point increase in loan spread predicts a 0.8% higher excess return, a proxy for risk premium, over the first 3 months of secondary market trading. More importantly, it also predicts a 3% higher probability of subsequent default, implying that ...
Working Paper
Pipeline Risk in Leveraged Loan Syndication
Leveraged term loans are typically arranged by banks but distributed to institutional investors. Using novel data, we find that to elicit investors' willingness to pay, arrangers expose themselves to pipeline risk: They have to retain larger shares when investors are willing to pay less than expected. We argue that the retention of such problematic loans creates a debt overhang problem. Consistent with this, we find that the materialization of pipeline risk for an arranger reduces its subsequent arranging and lending activity. Aggregate time series exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests ...
Working Paper
The U.S. Syndicated Loan Market: Matching Data
We introduce a new software package for determining linkages between datasets without common identifiers. We apply these methods to three datasets commonly used in academic research on syndicated lending: Refinitiv LPC DealScan, the Shared National Credit Database, and S&P Global Market Intelligence Compustat. We benchmark the results of our match using results from the literature and previously matched files that are publicly available. We find that the company level matching is enhanced by careful cleaning of the data and considering hierarchical relationships. For loan level matching, a ...
Working Paper
Securitization and lending standards: Evidence from the European wholesale loan market
We assess the effect of securitization activity on banks' lending rates employing a uniquely detailed dataset from the euro-denominated syndicated loan market. We find that, in the run up to the 2007-2009 crisis banks that were more active at originating asset-backed securities did not price their loans more aggressively (i.e. with narrower lending spreads) than less-active banks. Using a unique feature of our dataset, we show that also within the set of loans that were previously securitized, the relative level of securitization activity by the originating bank is not related to narrower ...