Agency Costs of Debt in Conglomerate Firms
利用会计改革，发现转向多业务部门的企业债券利差比单一业务企业高12%，且现金流波动大的多元化企业借贷成本上升最多，揭示了债务代理成本。
Abstract I use an accounting reform to assess the agency cost of debt in diversified firms. Those firms that switch from single to multiple segments following the reform suffer a 12% increase in their bond spread when compared with their stand-alone peers. Consistent with lenders anticipating underinvestment and asset-substitution incentives, diversified firms with high cash-flow volatility across divisions suffer the highest increase in borrowing costs. I employ a novel approach that allows abstracting from unobservable characteristics that would otherwise influence the pricing of diversified firms’ debt.