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This study analyzes whether industry relatedness between a corporate borrower and its group peers significantly affects that firm's borrowing cost.

A regression analysis is run on bank-loan data of a sample of Indonesian companies for 2010–2020. The main variables of interest are the natural logarithms of the borrowing firm's number of affiliates classified within either similar 2- or 4-digit GICS industries, and the Caves weighted index of these firms' related diversification. This index measures how firms in a group are diversified in relation to the borrower. The dependent variable is the all-in credit spread, stated in basis points, over the LIBOR or similar benchmark, as of the loan issuance date.

Findings support the industry-relatedness hypothesis and contradict the risk-reduction hypothesis and show that banks charge lower loan spreads on a borrowing firm that either operates within a similar industry as its affiliate or diversifies into related sectors or industries. Consistent with the co-insurance-effect hypothesis, the results also underline the importance of the parent and first-layer firms as supporting instead of the tunneling vehicles within business groups. These conclusions hold even after segregating the sample and using the loan maturity as the dependent variable.

This study uses a unique diversification measurement based on the borrowing firm's sector or industry, relative to other group members, and offers new insights on business group diversification and bank loan costs.

The author examines the presence of foreign currency effects and the risk-mitigation channel through which a foreign-currency denomination reduces the loan spread.

The author runs regression analyses using loan data of firms incorporated in member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from 2000 to 2020. The author also runs several robustness tests to address forward exchange rate bias, endogeneity concern and sample-selection bias.

Consistent with the currency matching motive of foreign debt use, the results show that a foreign currency denomination is associated with a lower spread and the relationship is amplified when there is a positive correlation between the changes in the return on assets and in the exchange rate.

This paper enriches existing studies on the use of foreign debt as an exchange rate risk management tool.

The results suggest that as firms utilize foreign debt and policymakers need to design banking regulations that not only oversee but also encourage the use of foreign debt as a hedging instrument to lower firms' borrowing costs.

This paper contributes to extant studies by examining the presence of foreign currency effects in emerging countries' loan markets and by exploiting the micro-level demand-side factors as the channel through which the currency denomination affects the loan spread.

This study examines the impact of firm-bank relationships on bank loan spreads and the mitigating role of firm credit ratings on that impact.

The study sample consists of Indonesian publicly listed companies for the period 2006 to 2016; bank-loan data was extracted from the Loan Pricing Corporation Dealscan database. For the degree of firm-bank relationships, the data on each loan is manually computed, using five different methods taken from Bharath et al. (2011) and Fields et al. (2012). All of the regression analyses are controlled for the year fixed effects, heteroscedasticity, and firm-level clustering. To address the endogeneity issues, this study uses several methods, including partitioning the sample, running nearest-neighbour and propensity score matching tests, and using instrumental variables in two-staged least-squares regression models.

In line with relationship theory and in opposition to the hold-up argument, this study finds that lending relationships reduce bank loan spreads and that the impact is more noticeable among non-rated Indonesian firms. Specifically, each additional unit in the total number of years of a firm-bank relationship and the number of previous loan contracts with the same bank are associated with 7.34 and 9.15 basis-point decreases, respectively, in these loan spreads.

Corporations and banks should maintain close, long-term relationships to reduce the screening and monitoring costs of borrowing. Regulators should create public policies that encourage banks to put more emphasis on relationships in their lending practices, especially in relation to crisis-prone companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of lending relationships on bank loan spreads in Indonesia. The study offers insights on banking relationships in emerging markets with concentrated banking industries, underdeveloped capital markets and prominent business-group affiliations.