I. INTRODUCTION
Financial misreporting impairs the credibility of a company’s financial information and increases the perceived
information asymmetry between management and capital providers (e.g., Palmrose, Richardson, and Scholz 2004;
Graham, Li, and Qiu 2008). As a result, firms involved in restating their previously issued financial statements are
usually faced with adverse consequences in the capital market. The extant literature has documented negative stock market
returns around the restatement announcement (e.g., Anderson and Yohn 2002; Palmrose et al. 2004) and an increased cost of
equity (e.g., Hribar and Jenkins 2004; Kravet and Shevlin 2010), as well as cost of debt (e.g., Graham et al. 2008; Shi and
Zhang 2008) for firms immediately after the restatement. However, prior studies focus on the consequences of restatements
after they are publicly announced, and little attention has been paid to whether banks make any reactions while the financial
misreporting is still in progress, i.e., in the misreporting period. To fill this void, this study attempts to provide systematic
evidence on banks’ reactions to the ongoing financial misconduct by borrowing firms. Specifically, I investigate whether banks
adjust important contract terms on loans issued to misstating firms in the misreporting period.1
I examine banks’ reactions for several reasons. First, reacting to financial misstatements during the misreporting period
requires the use of information—allowing identification of risk(s) associated with the misreporting—that has not yet been
publicly revealed. Finance theory suggests that banks have superior information gathering and processing abilities compared to
other capital providers (e.g., Fama 1985; Sharpe 1990; Diamond 1991). In particular, bank loans are different from other types