Financial Reporting Quality, Private Information, Monitoring, and the Lease-versus-Buy Decision
研究发现财务报告质量低的企业更倾向于租赁而非购买资产，因为出租方拥有更强的控制权；当银行监督激励强或贷款含资本支出条款时，这种关联减弱，表明其他机制可替代会计质量在缓解信息问题中的作用。
ABSTRACT: A flourishing stream of research suggests that liquidity-constrained firms with low accounting quality have limited access to capital for investments. We extend this research by investigating whether these firms are more likely to lease their assets. Lessors’ superior control rights allow them to provide capital to constrained firms with low-quality accounting reports. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that low accounting quality firms have a higher propensity to lease than purchase assets. To verify that leasing does not merely reflect these firms’ desire for off-balance-sheet accounting, we investigate whether banks’ access to private information and monitoring affect the relation between accounting quality and leasing. We find the association between accounting quality and leasing decreases when banks have higher monitoring incentives and when loans contain capital expenditure provisions. These results suggest that other mechanisms can substitute for the role of accounting quality in reducing information problems.