Data for: Are syndicated loans really cheaper?

This database contains information on large corporate and middle market commercial loans filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or obtained through other reliable public sources. The Compustat database complements the former database by providing information on borrowers. The fusion of the two databases uses the link table provided by Roberts and Chava (2008). Each contract listed in DealScan, referred to as a deal, consists of one or several facilities or tranches. DealScan provides a unique identification number for each deal allowing the identification of all the tranches belonging to the same deal. Different tranches in a deal can show heterogeneous characteristics in terms of interest rate spreads, amount, currency, maturity, default probability, among others. In particular, not all members of a syndicated loan participate in every tranche of the deal. Our initial information was composed of deals originated in the US market for the period 1986-2013 (inclusive) for which borrower accounting information is available in Compustat. In our empirical analysis, several measures related to the syndicate structure and its previous relationships with the borrower require using the information of the four years prior to each deal active date. This implies that deals from 1986-1989 are only used for this purpose, and therefore the final sample only considers loans issued between 1990 and 2013. Additionally, some loans are excluded from the 1990-2013 period. First, loans to borrowers that are government entities, banks, or financial institutions, and/or regulated borrowers, such as transportation and public utilities (industries identified as SIC 91-99, 60-67 and 40-49). Second, deals where at least one tranche is denominated in currencies other than the US dollar, or for which some basic information is missing, such as the facility amount or tranche interest spread. For the sake of homogeneity, deals with a base rate other than LIBOR were also excluded. After this cleaning process, the final sample consists of 32,102 tranches corresponding to 21,034 deals to 5,206 borrowers over the period 1990-2013. However, of those 32,102 potential observations, a smaller number have complete information for all the variables that we will use in each particular econometric model.