Organized Labor and Debt Contracting: Firm-Level Evidence from Collective Bargaining
利用企业层面集体谈判数据，研究发现工会化企业更偏好银行贷款而非公开债券，因为私下沟通能降低逆向选择成本；同时，工会力量影响银团贷款结构，导致牵头行保留更大份额并形成更集中的银团。
ABSTRACT This paper employs a firm-level collective bargaining dataset to investigate the effect of labor, as an important stakeholder of a firm, on debt contracting. I conjecture and provide evidence that firms with strong organized labor prefer bank loans to public bonds because, by communicating with banks privately, unionized firms can reduce the adverse selection costs while preserving the information asymmetry with organized labor. Furthermore, I show that organized labor influences the structure of syndicated loans. When firms with strong unions withhold public disclosures, but communicate privately with lead lenders, heightened information asymmetry between the lead lenders and the participant lenders induces the lead lenders to retain larger shares of the loans and form more concentrated syndicates. Overall, this study demonstrates that the proprietary costs of disclosure related to organized labor significantly influence firms' debt contracting decisions and outcomes. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the text.