Lease accounting, leverage and leasing decisions
研究了美国上市公司在ASC 842准则变化后，公司杠杆率如何影响其办公场所租赁决策，发现高杠杆公司会签下租金更低、期限更短的租约，但租赁面积不受影响。
We investigate the impact of leverage on leasing decisions for corporate offices by public US firms in the context of ASC 842. Previous studies show that the lease accounting change impacted leasing decisions. However, these studies aggregate leases across corporate asset types. This ignores that firm responses to the lease accounting change are likely to vary by asset type, for example, due to the availability of lease and purchase options. Our study focuses on corporate offices for which short-term and variable off-balance sheet leases are not available, and purchasing previously leased buildings is not financially feasible. We use a unique dataset of 4986 office leases across 16 US markets signed by 1092 public firms over the period of 2017 to 2022. We find that, following the change, a firm’s long-term debt ratio has a negative relationship with rental rates (starting and effective) and the term for office leases signed by the firm in the next quarter. It has no impact on the amount of space for which a firm signed a lease. Further analysis suggests that our results are driven by new leases and firms with a higher riskiness, as proxied by long-term to total debt ratio, credit rating or age.