Private Ownership and the Cost of Public Debt: Evidence from the Bond Market
研究了私有企业相比上市公司债务成本更高的原因，发现其受限的股权融资渠道、高管理层和私募股权持股以及较不保守的会计报告是主要机制，并通过控制信息披露环境提高了估计可靠性。
A number of studies have examined the effect of public and private ownership on the cost of debt and concluded that the cost of debt of privately owned firms is higher, driven mainly by the poorer information environment in which these firms operate. We extend this strand of research in two ways. First, we identify and empirically establish the mechanisms that bring about a higher cost of debt to privately owned firms—namely, the limited access that these firms have to the equity capital market, their high rate of management and private-equity ownership, and their less conservative reporting. Second, we improve the reliability of the estimates of the effect of ownership type on the cost of debt by controlling for the different information environments in which privately and publicly owned firms operate. This is accomplished through the use of a sample consisting of publicly owned and privately owned firms that have public debt and are therefore subject to identical reporting and disclosure requirements. Certain data and design features allow us to better control for other factors that might lead to the observed difference in the cost of debt between the two groups of firms. The results contribute to our understanding of the role of ownership type on the cost of capital. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.