Professor Jeremy McClane’s paper, Reconsidering Creditor Governance in a Time of Financial Alchemy, was just published by the Columbia Business Law Review and it’s a doozy.  His thesis is that lenders play an important role in corporate governance by imposing a degree of fiscal discipline on firms’ decisionmaking.  But when loans are securitized, lenders have fewer incentives to exercise control.  By analyzing SEC filings, he finds evidence to suggest that after firms violate financial covenants with lenders, the ones with nonsecuritized loans improve their performance and operate more conservatively, but the ones with securitized loans do not, implying that lenders intervened to force changes in the former category but not the latter.

The upshot: Lenders play an important role in corporate governance, with a view toward curbing the kind of short-term behavior that is often criticized from a stakeholder perspective (i.e., quick payouts that can make the firm more unstable and ultimately harm employees).  Securitization has therefore removed an important constraint on predatory behavior.