Audit Committee Member with Banking Expertise and the Cost of Bank Loan

學術上與實務上均一致地指出審計委員會成員若具有產業知識將可以提升審計委員會執行效率與效果，進而提升財務報表品質，降低外部財務報表使用者與公司內部之資訊不對稱情況。本研究探討在銀行貸款過程中，若借款公司審計委員會具有產業專長，銀行債務契約是否會改變。研究結果發現，借款銀行於設計債務契約時，確實會考量到借款公司審計委員會成員之產業專長，因其產業專長可提高財務報表可信度，降低資訊不對稱問題，減少銀行所面臨的信用風險，因此，若借款公司之審計委員會成員具備會計以及銀行相關背景與工作經驗，銀行將給予較優惠的債務條件以及較低的借款利率。The extant literature reveals that audit committee (AC) members with industry expertise can enhance AC’s effectiveness in monitoring the financial reporting process. In this dissertation, I focus exclusively on AC’s banking industry expertise and examine the effectiveness of an AC with a banking expert from debtholders’ point of view. First, I find that banks use more financial covenants, offer longer maturity, be less likely to require collateral, and charge lower interest rate for borrowers whose AC members have banking expertise and/or accounting expertise. Second, I further find that the association between AC expertise and loan terms is largely driven by banking expertise, either alone or in conjunction with accounting expertise than by accounting expertise alone. Further analyses reveal that borrower with a banking expertise on AC exhibits larger loan size and more lenders in a loan contract. The results are robust to a series of robustness tests, such as the join determination of loan terms, an endogeneity issue, and the deal-level analyses. Overall, my results suggest that banks value borrowers AC’s banking expertise in mitigating information risk and agency cost, thereby rewarding better loan terms for debt