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CATEGORIES:Seminars
DESCRIPTION:We construct a new global dataset that reconstructs the ultimate ownership structure of corporate debt by combining bank loan, credit line, and bond-level data for over 10,000 firms across 52 countries from 2003 to 2021. Unlike existing work that studies individual debt classes in isolation, we provide a unified view of firms’ creditor base across both bank and arm’s-length debt, allowing us to characterize how control-relevant and dispersed claims coexist within firms’ capital structures. Our central finding is that conclusions about creditor concentration depend critically on observing all debt classes. While bank debt is typically concentrated, arm’s-length debt is highly dispersed, and the relative importance of these two components varies systematically across firms and countries. As a result, total debt ownership is substantially more dispersed in environments where firms access arm’s-length investors, even when bank lending remains concentrated. This overturns the conventional view—based on bank debt alone—that weaker institutional environments are associated with more dispersed creditor structures. We show that the composition of creditor types, rather than legal origin per se, is the key determinant of observed ownership dispersion. Countries with stronger investor protection and deeper capital markets feature debt structures in which concentrated bank lenders coexist with large numbers of dispersed bondholders. In contrast, firms operating in weaker institutional environments rely more heavily on bank financing, borrow at shorter maturities, and access international creditors through foreign-currency debt. These patterns are strongest among small and medium-sized firms, whereas large firms exhibit globally dispersed creditor bases largely independent of their country of incorporation. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between control-bearing and non-control-bearing creditors in understanding corporate debt structure. By documenting how firms combine concentrated and dispersed debt claims across environments, we provide new evidence on the organization of corporate financing and a foundation for studying how creditor composition shapes financial contracting and the resolution of distress.748814
DTSTAMP:20260427T200317
DTSTART:20260506T134500
DTEND:20260506T151500
LOCATION:Kolade Teaching Room (Building One)
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:Finance and Accounting Research Seminar - Stefano Rossi (Bocconi University)
UID:d7a93618e1ba1feaebd54b8b1021c133@business-school.exeter.ac.uk
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