The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of stock price crash riskon the cost of debt for French listed companies. We use a sample of 221companies from 2008 to 2017 and find that stock price crashes increasethe cost of debt, suggesting that creditors consider a firm-level stock pricecrash to be an important risk factor when issuing loans. This positive effectis more pronounced in firms with high systematic risk and informationasymmetry issues. We also show that the positive effect of stock price crashrisk on the cost of debt is less prevalent when the manager or the foundingfamily is the first large shareholder of the company. These findings supportthe hypothesis of alignment of interests between managers and creditorsand are in line with the perspective of the social networks, owner-managersand families have with their banks
