Monitoring and Reputation: The Choice between Bank Loans and Directly Placed Debt
研究债务合同何时会被贷款人监督，即企业选择直接发债（无监督）还是通过银行借款（有监督）以缓解道德风险，发现信用评级中等的借款人和高利率或低盈利时期的优质借款人更依赖银行贷款。
This paper determines when a debt contract will be monitored by lenders. This is the choice between borrowing directly (issuing a bond, without monitoring) and borrowing through a bank that monitors to alleviate moral hazard. This provides a theory of bank loan demand and of the role of monitoring in circumstances in which reputation effects are important. A key result is that borrowers with credit ratings toward the middle of the spectrum rely on bank loans, and in periods of high interest rates or low future profitability, higher-rated borrowers choose to borrow from banks. Copyright 1991 by University of Chicago Press.