The Effect of Lease Accounting on Credit Rating and Cost of Debt: Evidence from Firms in Korea

Abstract

This study examines the effect of capital lease and operating lease options in accounting on credit ratings and the cost of debt using data for 13 years (2001 to 2013) on 6133 listed and unlisted domestic firms in Korea that recognize leases on financial statements. We use the Heckman two-stage model to control for sample selection bias from lease selection. The first stage is the probit regression in which the dependent variable is a dummy variable on the lease selection and the explanatory variables are factors known to affect lease selection. The second stage consists of the ordered probit regression model and the ordinary least square regression model where the dependent variables are credit rating and cost of debt, respectively. The results show that lease selection does not significantly affect corporate credit ratings—however, in terms of the cost of debt, enterprises that adopt operating leases spend considerably less than firms that engage in capital leases. Further analysis suggests that the results for credit ratings do not differ by listing status. However, the cost of debt for listed companies does not seem to differ by lease selection, while unlisted firms see a sharp decline in their cost of debt when they choose operating leases over capital leases.