会计系学术讲座系列2021年第2讲

主 题：Skilled Labor and Bank Loan Contracts

主讲人: 麻志明（北京大学光华管理学院副教授）

协调人: 张敏 汝毅

时 间：2021-03-24 10:00

地 点：明商1008会议室

语 言：中英文

讲座摘要:

This paper examines the credit risk implications of a firm’s reliance on skilled labor and provides an empirical analysis of the effect of skilled labor on loan contracting outcomes. Using a sample of listed U.S. firms from 1998 to 2016, we find that banks charge higher interest rates to firms relying on high-skill workers than on low-skill workers. This effect is stronger for firms with higher asset-based operating leverage, higher probabilities of employee turnover, and severer conflicts of interest between equity holders and debt holders. In addition, we predict and find that a firm’s reliance on skilled labor is positively (negatively) associated with the relative usage of capital (performance) covenants and with the ex-ante probability of capital (performance) covenant violations. Our results hold when applying different matching methods and fixed-effect models. Overall, our study demonstrates the impact of skilled labor, an important labor-force heterogeneity, on debt contract design and contributes to the understanding of the interaction between labor and capital, i.e., the two primary inputs of a firm.

主讲人简介:

Zhiming Ma is an Associate Professor of Accounting at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China. He obtained his PhD from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are about debt contracting, auditing, and firm governance. His research has appeared in journals such as Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Academy of Management Journal，Contemporary Accounting Research and Accounting, Organizations and Society.