Introduction

Although companies and organisations worldwide rely heavily on debt markets for short, medium and long-term financing, the interface between accounting and debt markets remains comparatively under-researched. As the 2007-2008 financial crisis and its aftermath showed, debt markets and financial intermediaries can have significant effects on the real economy. Accounting information has various functions in debt markets, including, inter alia, informing pricing decisions and credit ratings, determining the allocation of creditor control rights and establishing bank capital adequacy requirements. Nevertheless, our understanding about the determinants and consequences of accounting information usage in debt markets is limited in many important respects.