IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jfinqa/v53y2018i05p2131-2160_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Earthly Reward to the Religious: Religiosity and the Costs of Public and Private Debt

Author

Listed:
  • Jiang, Feng
  • John, Kose
  • Li, C. Wei
  • Qian, Yiming

Abstract

We document that a firm’s culture, specifically, its religiosity, affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions. Further, religiosity has additional explanatory power for the cost of bank loans (but not the cost of public bonds) beyond its impact through ratings. This supports the argument that banks have superior abilities in pricing soft information, such as corporate culture. Finally, the impact of religiosity is stronger when the lender is a small bank.

Suggested Citation

  • Jiang, Feng & John, Kose & Li, C. Wei & Qian, Yiming, 2018. "Earthly Reward to the Religious: Religiosity and the Costs of Public and Private Debt," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 53(5), pages 2131-2160, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jfinqa:v:53:y:2018:i:05:p:2131-2160_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002210901800039X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jfinqa:v:53:y:2018:i:05:p:2131-2160_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jfq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.