By B. Espen Eckbo (Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth), Kai Li (Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia) and Wei Wang (Smith School of Business at Queen’s University)
After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it takes large firms on average 16 months to restructure debt obligations and emerge as a going concern. With little cash on hand at filing, many firms need an infusion of new debt capital in order to fund continued operations while in bankruptcy. The standard debt instrument for this purpose is a debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan. Clearly, for a lender to be willing to supply a DIP loan, the loan must be fully collateralized and grant the lender extensive control rights. With an unprecedented large sample of DIP loan packages over the period 2002-2014 – totaling $120 billion in constant 2017 dollars – we first show that DIP loan contracts are fully collateralized, highly restrictive instruments. Our main research question is whether the interest rate on DIP loans reflects the actual risk of the firm defaulting on its DIP loan obligation. Our evidence on actual loan defaults strongly indicates that DIP loans are nearly risk-free, with only a single economic default (without full recovery) going back to 1988 (a default rate of 0.13% or lower). Nevertheless, loan spreads (the interest rate in excess of the London Inter-bank Offered Rate or LIBOR) average 604 basis points (bps), which exceeds even the average spread of even high-risk (“junk”) bonds. While desperate borrowers are willing to pay supra-competitive DIP loan prices, the central question is why competition among lenders fails to bring down DIP-loan spreads.
To answer this question, we first show that prepetition lenders dominate the supply of DIP loans (more than 70% of the cases). This is hardly surprising since, under §364(d) of the Bankruptcy Code, granting collateral to the DIP lender requires “priming” the lien of prepetition lenders, the debtor must obtain their consent. Moreover, a prepetition lender may “roll up” portions of the existing debt into the DIP loan package, which lowers the risk of the prepetition loan as well. By blocking the debtor’s access to DIP loans from new lenders, prepetition DIP-loan providers are in a strong monopolistic bargaining position vis-à-vis the debtor – resulting in opportunities for rent extraction. However, when collateralizing the DIP loan does not require priming prepetition lenders, the debtor may turn to new lenders such as hedge funds (HF) or private equity funds (PE). In these cases, it is reasonable to expect competition among the prospective DIP-loan providers to lower spreads. However, we find the opposite: While there is no evidence that DIP loans provided by new lenders face a greater risk of default, loans spreads are significantly higher.
It is possible that, notwithstanding the strong contractual protection afforded by DIP loans, there may be unobservable heterogeneity in the risk of firms seeking DIP loans that only a skilled DIP-loan provider is able to detect ex ante. If so, a high loan spread may be viewed as a return to the loan provider’s unique screening ability. We investigate this possibility by comparing spreads and fees in DIP loans on leveraged loans (“junk” debt). Presumably, the much longer maturities of leveraged loans (on average five years), combined with their much lower control rights and degree of collateralization, renders leveraged loans more risky than DIP loans. In fact, using Moody’s rating information, the typical spread on a B-rated leveraged loan has an expected default rate that is much higher than what we estimate for our DIP loan sample. Therefore, we expect leveraged loans that are supplied by sophisticated financial institutions to have higher spreads. Instead, we find the opposite: DIP-loan spreads are 236 bps higher than leveraged loans matched on size, industry and year of issuance, 255 bps (152 bps) higher than leveraged loans by the same firm within three years (one year) of filing.
Last, but not least, we show that junior claimholders (unsecured creditor committees and suppliers) file objections to the DIP-loan terms in as much as over 60% of the cases in our sample. Moreover, spreads are 80+ bps higher when objections occur, suggesting that high spreads are a concern. However, reading case files, we do not find a single case where the court lowered the loan spread (or fee). Although both the spirit and the letter of §364 require the terms of DIP-loans to be “fair, reasonable and adequate”, courts appear not to act as a backstop for what our data strongly suggest is significant extraction of economic rents by DIP-loan providers.
The full article is available here.