This paper examines the effect of shareholder governance on firms' cost of borrowing using the voting outcomes of shareholder-sponsored anti-takeover governance proposals. Implementing a regression discontinuity design centered around the proposals' passing thresholds, we show that firms' public debt prices fall significantly upon the proposals' passage, and that banks demand higher interest rates and more general covenants on new loans issued to those firms. We find that these effects are more pronounced for riskier firms where shareholder-debtholder conflicts are more severe. Moreover, firms with passed shareholder-sponsored proposals become more volatile, reflecting an increase in their risk-shifting incentives. Collectively, our findings suggest that shareholder governance exacerbates shareholder-debtholder conflicts and raises firms’ cost of borrowing.

本文利用股东发起的反收购治理提案的投票结果，检验了股东治理对公司借贷成本的影响。实施以提案通过门槛为中心的不连续性回归设计，我们表明公司的公共债务价格在提案通过后显着下降，并且银行要求更高的利率和对向这些公司发放的新贷款的更多一般契约。我们发现，对于股东-债权人冲突更为严重的风险较高的公司，这些影响更为明显。此外，通过股东发起的提案的公司变得更加不稳定，反映出其风险转移激励的增加。总的来说，