6.8. Cost of debt capital
While only four papers in our database examine debt market consequences of earnings quality, the limited evidence is nonetheless consistent with evidence from equity markets. Overall, the cost of debt seems to be higher when EQ proxies indicate low earnings quality. Francis et al. (2005a) find that firms with lower quality accruals have a higher ratio of interest expense to interest-bearing outstanding debt and lower S&P Issuer Credit Ratings. Anderson et al. (2004) find that firms with higher board independence, higher audit committee independence, and larger board size have lower costs of debt measured as the yield spread. Graham et al. (2008) document that banks use tighter loan contracting terms following their client firms’ restatements. Bhojraj and Swaminathan (2007) find that firms with high operating accruals have significantly lower one-year-ahead bond returns, consistent with bond investors mispricing high and low accrual firms in much the same way that equity investors do.
Debt markets not only provide a useful opportunity to validate the findings in equity markets, but also provide two additional opportunities: 1) to examine accounting choices that are irrelevant to quality characteristics of interest to equity markets, and 2) to assess trade-offs between multiple incentives for producing high-quality earnings.