Firms’ Financial Reporting Quality and Banks’ Shock Transmission

Abstract

We highlight the role of firms’ financial reporting quality in the transmission of bank credit supply shocks to the economy. We exploit a large dataset of all corporate loans in Spain over 2009-2019 which allows us to identify firm-year bank credit supply shocks by accounting for time-varying firm heterogeneity in loan demand. We find that after an adverse bank credit supply shock, firms with lower financial reporting quality experience a sharper contraction in bank credit compared to firms with higher financial reporting quality. Further, such firms are unable to fully substitute the additional drop in bank credit with alternative financing sources, resulting in a higher decrease in their investment and asset growth. These results are amplified for financially constrained firms. Our findings suggest that financial reporting quality is related to lower information frictions between firms and capital providers.