About

Brian Akins is an associate professor of accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. He teaches financial accounting in the full-time and professional MBA programs as well as in the Ph.D. program. His research focuses on financial reporting quality and the impact of accounting in debt and equity market settings. Dr. Akins earned his Ph.D. in accounting from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012, where he studied the relationship between reporting quality and uncertainty about credit risk, specifically examining disagreement between rating agencies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin and has also earned master’s degrees in business administration from Rice University and in biblical interpretation from Lubbock Christian University.

Research topics

• Monetary economics
• Macroeconomics
• Finance
• Economics
• Business

Selected publications

• <scp>CEO</scp> short‐term incentives and the agency cost of debt

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2025-04-12 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract This paper shows that creditors' horizon interests impact the design of CEO compensation contracts. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that borrowing firms provide shorter incentives to their CEO following a loan covenant violation. They do so by decreasing the horizon of pay and tilting the choice of performance metrics toward accounting goals, in particular short‐term ones. This effect is stronger when creditors' interests are more immediate, such as among loans with short remaining maturity and when borrowers have lower cash reserves. This effect is weaker when the cost to shareholders is higher, such as among firms with high growth opportunities. Together these results are consistent with boards intending to facilitate renegotiation and mitigate repayment risk while balancing shareholder interests. Overall, our evidence supports a novel reason for the use of short‐term incentives, namely to reduce the agency cost of debt.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blocking Block Formation: Evidence from Private Loan Contracts

  Management Science · 2025-02-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Does the structure of the borrower’s equity ownership matter in debt contracting? This paper addresses this question by examining change in control clauses. These clauses are pervasive in loan contracts, yet their terms are not boilerplate. Examining 14,940 contracts, we document significant heterogeneity in the use and size of ownership caps, which limit large equity block formation. Overall, our evidence indicates that the way equity capital is distributed matters to lenders. Lenders set lower caps to mitigate risks arising from power contests among shareholders, formation of a new (coordinating) block, potentially resulting in activism, and hostile takeover threats via toehold strategies. We confirm some of these effects using two quasi-natural experiments. Caps below 50% are associated with a drop in firm value but not in the cost of debt, consistent with exacerbated firm-manager agency costs. Finally, two findings shed light on ways creditors may influence corporate governance: the largest block size increases when these minority block restrictions expire, and the likelihood of withdrawing an announced buyback increases during the life of these loans. This paper was accepted by Bo Becker, finance. Supplemental Material: The internet appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.04224 .

  PublisherDOI

• Debt Contracting on Management

  The Journal of Finance · 2020 · 37 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Monetary economics
  • Finance

  ABSTRACT Change of management restrictions (CMRs) in loan contracts give lenders explicit ex ante control rights over managerial retention and selection. This paper shows that lenders use CMRs to mitigate risks arising from CEO turnover, especially those related to the loss of human capital and replacement uncertainty, thereby providing evidence that human capital risk affects debt contracting. With a CMR in place, the likelihood of CEO turnover decreases by more than half, and future firm performance improves when retention frictions are important, suggesting that lenders can influence managerial turnover, even outside of default states, and help the borrower retain talent.

  PublisherDOI

• Blocking Block-Formation: Evidence from Private Loan Contracts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Salience of Creditors' Interests and CEO Compensation

  2019-08-01 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper shows that firms adjust CEO compensation policies when creditors' interests are more salient. This effect helps explain controversial compensation practices such as weak performance incentives and short pay duration. Our findings also show that to mitigate the agency cost of debt, compensation contracts can reflect not only the firm's capital structure but the debt contract itself. For example, firms tend to contract on accounting-based goals when creditors do as well. Our analysis relies on a regression discontinuity design around loan covenant violations. We also confirm our conclusions studying a broad sample of financially constrained firms seeking debt financing.

• Financial Reporting Quality and Uncertainty about Credit Risk among Ratings Agencies

  The Accounting Review · 2017-10-01 · 99 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This study finds that better reporting quality is associated with less uncertainty about credit risk as captured by disagreement among the credit rating agencies. The results also show that reporting quality is more important in reducing uncertainty when debt market participants have less access to private information. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, I use the quasi-natural experiment induced by a change in accounting standards that improved reporting quality. Implementation of the standard led to less disagreement among the rating agencies. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on the impact of reporting quality on debt markets and intermediaries.

  PublisherDOI

• Do CEO Compensation Policies Respond to Debt Contracting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-08-18 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Contracting on Performance and Risk-Taking: Creditors vs. Shareholders

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Debt Contracting on Management

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bank Competition and Financial Stability: Evidence from the Financial Crisis

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2016-02-01 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract We examine the link between bank competition and financial stability using the recent financial crisis as the setting. We utilize variation in banking competition at the state level and find that banks facing less competition are more likely to engage in risky activities, more likely to face regulatory intervention, and more likely to fail. Focusing on the real estate market, we find that states with less competition had higher rates of mortgage approval, experienced greater inflation in housing prices before the crisis, and experienced a steeper decline in housing prices during the crisis. Overall, our study is consistent with greater competition increasing financial stability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Ng

  12 shared

• David De Angelis

  University of Houston

  10 shared

• Jonathan Bitting

  Appalachian State University

  9 shared

• Maclean Gaulin

  University of Utah

  8 shared

• Lynn Li

  Boston University

  6 shared

• Rodrigo S. Verdi

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  5 shared

• Tjomme O. Rusticus

  3 shared

• Yiwei Dou

  3 shared