Choices in financing is an important issue when firms need to leverage. With the giant capital concerned, including the capital structure, investment decision-making, and dividend policy etc., it plays a crucial role for a firm's future. Among the foreign literatures, unlike equity offerings or public debt offerings, bank loan financing elicits a significant positive stock price reaction. The lengthy foreign literature on firm financing decisions relies (in parts) on this finding to characterize bank loans as ¡§unique¡¨ or ¡§special¡¨ forms of external finance. During the process of approval for loan, banks will make a great effort on monitoring and verifying the quality of firm¡¦s credit capability. The information banks get makes bank loan as an important way to reducing the information asymmetry between firms and the investigators. We further explore the uniqueness of private lending announcement by examining the short-run and the long-run equity performance of bank borrowers. With single-factor model and Fama-French three-factor model, the loan announcement both caused a positive borrowers returns in the short run and long run overall. But there is no cross-sectional effect in the short run. Although the industry variable elicits a significant positive reaction in the long run, it¡¦s only because of the characteristic of the industry, not the loan announcement effects. We conclude that the loan announcement has no influence on the borrowers return

A loan deal is often composed of several components (for example, a 3-year revolving loan, a 10-year secured senior term loan, and a 5-year subordinated term loan). The division of a deal into two or more components, each with different risk characteristics, is called tranching. This study recognizes the importance of tranching and establishes tranching as an integral component of a syndicated loan structure. In the first essay, we present a model to explain the economic value of tranching and show that riskier firms are more likely to take loans with multiple tranches. Therefore, the average credit spread on syndicated loans with multiple tranches is higher than that on nontranched loans. However, after accounting for the risk characteristics of a tranched loan, we show that a given tranche of a multi-tranche loan, on average, has a lower credit spread than an otherwise similar loan that is not part of a multi-tranche loan. We also show that the benefits of tranching accrue primarily to borrowers with speculative debt ratings. Prior studies have found an abnormal stock return of 100 to 150 basis points for firms that announce they have borrowed funds from a bank. Despite some conflicting evidence (Peterson and Rajan, 2002; Thomas and Wang, 2004; Billett, Flannery and Garfinkel, 2006), the literature tends to interpret this positive bank loan announcement effect as the markets response to the mitigation of information asymmetry regarding the borrowing firm caused by the certification role of the lending banks who act as quasi-insiders. In the second essay, we document that a strong selection bias exists in prior studies. We show that less than a quarter of the loans made by banks are ever announced by borrowing firms and the loans that are announced are systematically different from loans that are never announced by the firms. Firms with low debt ratings, firms with zero or negative profits but positive interest expense, firms that take large loans in relation to their assets base, firms with little analyst following, and firms with high forecasted EPS growth are more likely to announce their loans. We show that while there was a positive announcement effect over the period 1987 to 1995, loan announcements elicited zero or negative returns in the last ten years as the mix of companies announcing loans changed over time.

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