Table 4 reports comparisons across the three types of new debt financing of variables that
proxy for information asymmetry, project and credit quality, growth opportunities, and
managerial ownership
Second, the quality of the existing rating is much higher for the public issuers than for
both bank and other private borrowers. Private, non-bank borrowers have the lowest quality
rating. The median firm that issues public debt has a “BBB” debt rating (and a high of “AAA”),
while the median private or bank borrower is not rated. The bank borrower with the highest
rating is rated “AA”, while among the private, non-bank borrowers the one with the highest
rating is rated “A”, just slightly higher than the average public borrower. Becaus e the
availability of credit rating might simply reflect whether the firm has public debt outstanding,
rather than credit quality,16 we also compare separately the firms with existing ratings. If we
consider only the firms that do have credit ratings, the median public issuer has a rating of “BBB+” (high=“AAA”, low=“CCC+”), the median bank borrower has a rating of “BB-”
(high=“AA”, low=“CCC+”), while the median private borrower is rated “BB-“ (high=“A”,
low=“CCC-”). The three distributions are different from each other at the 1% confidence level.