论文标题：Prosocial CEOs and the cost of debt: Evidence from syndicated loan contracts

发表时间：2023年2月

论文所有作者：Chunbo Liu, Liang Xu, Haoyi Yang, Wenqiao Zhang

期刊名及所属分类：Journal of Corporate Finance, SSCI

英文摘要：This paper investigates whether banks value the presence of prosocial CEOs when designing loan contracts. Using personal charitable donation behavior to identify prosocial CEOs, we find robust evidence that the presence of prosocial CEOs is negatively related to firms’ cost of debt. We address endogeneity concerns by employing a difference-in-differences setting that exploits exogenous CEO turnover events. Moreover, we show that the presence of prosocial CEOs mitigates the conflicts of interest between shareholders and creditors, thereby reduces the agency cost of debt. In addition, we find that the effect of prosocial CEOs also extends to non-price loan contract terms. Finally, we show that the presence of prosocial CEOs has positive implications for firm value and is associated with lower default risk.