Corporate liquidity and dividend policy under uncertainty

We examine optimal liquidity (retained earnings) and dividend choice incorporating debt financing with risk of default and bankruptcy costs as well as growth options under revenue uncertainty. We revisit the conditions for dividend policy irrelevancy and the broader role of retained earnings and dividends. Retained earnings have a net positive impact on firm value in the presence of growth options, high external financing costs and low default risk. High levels of retained earnings enhance debt capacity but have a negative effect on equity value due to the likelihood of losing accumulated cash balances in case of default, unless offset by high external financing costs. Opposite directional effects of retained earnings on equity and debt create a U-shaped relation with firm value. The framework is extended to analyze management-shareholder conflicts, demonstrating that managers accumulate higher than optimal cash.     

Corporate liquidity and dividend policy under uncertainty

We examine optimal liquidity (retained earnings) and dividend choice incorporating debt financing with risk of default and bankruptcy costs as well as growth options under revenue uncertainty. We revisit the conditions for dividend policy irrelevancy and the broader role of retained earnings and dividends. Retained earnings have a net positive impact on firm value in the presence of growth options, high external financing costs and low default risk. High levels of retained earnings enhance debt capacity but have a negative effect on equity value due to the likelihood of losing accumulated cash balances in case of default, unless offset by high external financing costs. Opposite directional effects of retained earnings on equity and debt create a U-shaped relation with firm value. The framework is extended to analyze management-shareholder conflicts, demonstrating that managers accumulate higher than optimal cash.     

OPERATING LEVERAGE AND UNDERINVESTMENT

Using a contingent claims model, we examine the impacts of both operating leverage and financial leverage on a firm's investment decisions in the context of capacity expansion. Our model shows that quasi‐fixed operating costs could significantly mitigate the underinvestment problem for debt‐financed firms. The existing debt induces equity holders to delay equity‐financed expansion because the expanded earnings base will also benefit the debt holders by lowering the bankruptcy risk. The operating costs decrease this type of wealth transfer from equity holders to debt holders by magnifying the bankruptcy risk of the existing debt upon investment. By applying the Cox proportional hazard model on a large sample of publicly traded U.S. firms over 1966–2016, we offer empirical support for the theoretical predictions. The results are robust to various measures of operating leverage.     

Strategic Default and Equity Risk Across Countries

We show that the prospect of a debt renegotiation favorable to shareholders reduces the firm's equity risk. Equity beta and return volatility are lower in countries where the bankruptcy code favors debt renegotiations and for firms with more shareholder bargaining power relative to debt holders. These relations weaken as the country's insolvency procedure favors liquidations over renegotiations. In the limit, when debt contracts cannot be renegotiated, equity risk is independent of shareholders' incentives to default strategically. We argue that these findings support the hypothesis that the threat of strategic default can reduce the firm's equity risk.     

Book-tax conformity and capital structure

We examine the effect of increased book-tax conformity on corporate capital structure. Prior studies document a decrease in the informativeness of accounting earnings for equity markets resulting from higher book-tax conformity. We argue that the decrease in earnings informativeness impacts equity holders more than debt holders because of the differences in payoff structures between debt and equity investments such that increases in book-tax conformity lead to increases in firms’ reliance on debt capital. We exploit a natural experiment in the U.S. and find that firms facing an increase in required book-tax conformity increase leverage relative to other firms. We also provide evidence of an increase in the cost of equity (but not of debt) capital for firms facing an increase in required book-tax conformity, relative to control firms, and show that these increases in cost of equity capital are positively associated with an increase in leverage. Our findings are consistent with firms substituting away from equity and toward more debt in the presence of higher book-tax conformity.     

Earnings Management Surrounding New Debt Issues

We examine whether firms manage earnings before issuing bonds to achieve a lower cost of borrowing. We find significant income‐increasing earnings management prior to bond offerings. We also find that firms that manage earnings upward issue debt at a lower cost, after controlling for various bond issuer and issue characteristics. Our results are consistent with studies that report earnings management around equity issuance. The results indicate that, like equity holders, bondholders fail to see through the inflated earnings numbers in pricing new debt.     

Rollover Risk and Credit Risk

Our model shows that deterioration in debt market liquidity leads to an increase in not only the liquidity premium of corporate bonds but also credit risk. The latter effect originates from firms' debt rollover. When liquidity deterioration causes a firm to suffer losses in rolling over its maturing debt, equity holders bear the losses while maturing debt holders are paid in full. This conflict leads the firm to default at a higher fundamental threshold. Our model demonstrates an intricate interaction between the liquidity premium and default premium and highlights the role of short‐term debt in exacerbating rollover risk.     

Market perceptions of discretionary accruals by debt renegotiating firms during economic downturn

This study addresses how a stock market prices earnings components around a sudden and severe economic downturn. In particular, the study examines the market valuation of discretionary accruals for debt renegotiating Malaysian firms during the Asian financial crisis. Our analysis shows that negative discretionary accruals for debt renegotiating firms are associated with higher market values of equity and are not related to the firms' future earnings. These findings are consistent with investors placing a positive value on the probability that negative accruals increase the likelihood that concessions can be extracted from lenders during renegotiation. In contrast, discretionary accruals for a control sample of non-debt renegotiating firms are not significantly associated with stock prices but are positively associated with future earnings.     

The Debt Trap: Wealth Transfers and Debt‐Equity Choices of Junk‐Grade Firms

If outstanding debt is risky, issuing equity transfers wealth from equity holders to debt holders. If existing leverage is high and bankruptcy costs are small, this wealth transfer effect outweighs the gains to stockholders from optimizing firm value. Empirically, we find that for investment‐grade firms, higher leverage implies a greater likelihood of issuing equity, as expected in a standard tradeoff model. However, consistent with the impact of wealth transfer effects, for junk‐grade firms, higher leverage implies a greater likelihood of issuing debt. The analysis implies an additional route through which historical shocks determine firms’ financing choices.     

CAPITAL STRUCTURE MANAGEMENT AS A MOTIVATION FOR CALLING CONVERTIBLE DEBT

Using a matched-pairs methodology, we present empirical evidence of systematic changes within a corporation that are associated with calls of convertible debt. We find that calling firms experience significantly greater growth than noncalling firms in the same industry, as measured by retained earnings and long-term debt. Also, the converted debt provides a significant source of new book equity, and calling firms issue significantly less other new equity. The pattern of growth in balance sheet accounts is consistent with the pecking order hypothesis and supports the notion that some firms call convertible debt to reduce their total cost of obtaining additional external financing. The evidence also shows that, on average, calling firms experience a significant decline in their leverage ratio based on book value but no significant change in their leverage ratio based on market value of equity. This is consistent with the call's being used as part of the firm's management of its capital structure.     

Beating market expectations and the pricing of firms’ probability of default

This study explores the impact of beating analysts' forecasts on investors' perceptions about firms' default probability. The information contained in analysts’ forecasts, both earnings and revenues, provides additional information to investors in pricing CDSs. While previous research has focused on the impact of beating analysts’ earnings forecasts, this study shows that firms that beat analysts' revenue forecasts also experience, on average, a decrease in the CDS premium around the earnings announcement date. This study also documents that the effect is stronger when firms beat/miss both earnings and revenue forecasts. When firms beat (miss) earnings and miss (beat) revenues, the effect of earnings is the dominant signal. These effects are stronger for firms with high levels of default risk.     

Differences in the valuation of earnings and book value: Regulation effects or industry effects?

This paper uses a valuation framework on a sample of firms from four European countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, and United Kingdom) to examine how income, accruals, and book value of equity are perceived by the respective capital markets. Our model includes adjustments for industry effects and taking into account the linear information dynamics of the accounting variables posited in the Ohlson model. Consistent with previous researchers, we find that both earnings and book value of equity have valuation implications and that there is significant dispersion in the country-specific and industry-specific valuation multiples. However, when using accounting variables to forecast market values we find that industry-specific valuation multiples reduce forecasting error more than country-specific ones.     

How Do Capital Structure Policies of Emerging Markets Differ from Those of Developed Economies? Survey Evidence from Korea

We examine the capital structure policies of Korean firms using survey data for business group (chaebol) firms and independent firms. Our results are compared with findings in earlier studies for developed economies: Graham and Harvey (2001) for the United States and Brounen et al. (2004, 2006) for Europe. Korean chief financial officers are concerned about financial flexibility and volatility of earnings when issuing debt; they are concerned about target debt ratio maintenance and recent stock price increases when issuing equity. In contrast to independent firms, chaebol firms are more concerned about differences in corporate tax rates between foreign and domestic markets and the risk of refinancing in bad times. Chaebol firms are less likely to issue debt when faced with insufficient internal funds, which indicates that active internal capital markets are at work among the firms in a business group. Our results suggest that, compared to U. S. and European firms, Korean firms are under more pressure from their peers in formulating capital structure policies, consider equity a cheap source of financing, are less concerned with the dilution of earnings per share, and less frequently provide shares to employees as compensation.     

Does the Riskiness of R&D Outweigh Its Benefits? The Perspective of US Private Lenders

We investigate the relationship between R&D investments and loan spread. Prior research documents that R&D is associated with greater future benefits and risks, suggesting that the valuation of R&D depends on a tradeoff between the two. Some research finds that bondholders consider that the benefits of R&D outweigh its risks: R&D is negatively associated with bond yields. This is surprising given that debt holders are more concerned about downside risk due to asymmetric payoffs. Using data on private debt from the US, we find an overall positive association between loan spread and R&D intensity, suggesting that the riskiness of R&D appears to outweigh its benefits for private lenders. Furthermore, an asymmetric payoff structure implies that the risks of R&D for lenders increase with default risk. Consistent with this argument, we find a positive association between R&D and loan spread for firms that are smaller, with high default‐risk ratings, unrated (no public debt), or in industries with weaker legal protection. Unrated firms are in the most R&D‐intensive group and make up nearly 60% of the firms with private debt. Consequently, studies that exclude unrated firms are likely to present an incomplete picture of the perspective of debt holders on R&D.     

Impact of proximity to debt covenant violation on earnings management

We examine the impact of differential incentives arising from proximity to debt covenant violation on earnings management. We reason that firms with loans close to violation or in technical default of their debt covenants have a stronger incentive to engage in earnings management than firms that are far from violating their debt covenants. We find results consistent with this expectation. Firms close to violation or in technical default of their debt covenants engage in higher levels of accounting earnings management, real earnings management, and total earnings management than far-from-violation firms. In additional analysis, we find that firms with a stronger incentive to avoid covenant violation switched from using more accounting earnings management before the Sarbanes–Oxley Act to using more real earnings management and more total earnings management afterwards. We also document that the earnings management implications of debt covenant violation are observed primarily for firms with poor credit ratings and for firms that do not meet analyst forecasts.     

On the suboptimality of single-factor exercise strategies for Bermudan swaptions

This paper examines the interaction between momentum in the returns of equities and corporate bonds. We find that investment grade corporate bonds do not exhibit momentum at the three- to 12-month horizons. Instead, the evidence suggests that they exhibit reversals. However, significant evidence exists of a momentum spillover from equities to investment grade corporate bonds of the same firm. Firms earning high (low) equity returns over the previous year earn high (low) bond returns the following year. The spillover results are stronger among firms with lower-grade debt and higher equity trading volume, seem robust to various risk and liquidity controls, and hold even after controlling for past earnings surprises. In examining the source of the spillover, we find that the bond ratings of firms with positive (negative) equity momentum continue to improve (deteriorate) in the future, suggesting underreaction to the information in past equity prices about changing default risk is a likely source of the spillover effect. Overall, our results suggest that both equity and debt underreact to firm fundamentals, but past equity returns is a better proxy of firm fundamentals than past bond returns.     

The changing relevance of accounting information to debt holders over time

A number of studies have examined the change over time in the information content of accounting numbers to stockholders. However, the stockholders’ perspective is not necessarily identical to that of debt holders. The two groups face different risks and rewards, and thus their informational needs are not the same. We examine the change in the information content of accounting numbers over time from the debt holders’ perspective and hypothesize about the economic and reporting factors likely to affect this change. Using the association between accounting numbers and bond valuation and returns, we find that the information content to debt holders has increased over time. In contrast, but consistent with prior studies, we find that the information content to equity holders has declined. The results suggest that the increased information content to debt holders is related to changes in credit risk and to reporting factors such as the increase in reporting conservatism, the shift towards fair value accounting, and the increase in the frequency of losses. The findings contribute to the scant literature on the use of accounting information by debt holders and the extent to which financial reporting meets their unique needs.     

Preferred stock: Some insights into capital structure

This study analyzes the reactions of equity holders and bondholders to the announcement of 427 preferred stock issues. We document an average equity announcement effect of − 0.65%. This reaction is positively influenced by a number of measures of firm creditworthiness and transparency and is higher for bank issuers. The equity market reaction is negatively influenced by convertibility (and the moneyness of the embedded option) and by the firm's accounting treatment of the issue (specifically if the issue is classified as equity). We find that average credit default swap spreads decrease by 50 basis points after the issue announcement. This decrease is also larger for more creditworthy and transparent firms. Convertibility and the moneyness of the embedded option further decrease the CDS spread. In aggregate, the decrease in equity value is much smaller than the increase in the value of the issuer's debt.     

Demand for fair value accounting: The case of the asset revaluation boom in Korea during the global financial crisis

When the fair value accounting (FVA) option for property, plant, and equipment was introduced in the midst of the global financial crisis, a significant proportion of Korean firms elected FVA. We attribute this unusual boom in asset revaluations to the nation's culture of government intervention and civilian compliance, which was particularly espoused during this period of financial turmoil, and a foreseeable option to switch back to historical cost accounting. We find that among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are low, public firms opt for the FVA option more often than private firms, suggesting that the need to communicate fair value information with diversified equity holders is more important than the need to do so with creditors. In contrast, among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are high enough to warrant such unfavorable dispositions as new debt freezes and monitoring by regulators, we find no difference in the FVA choice between private and public firms. These findings imply that during the global financial crisis, private firms that rely heavily on debt financing have a strong incentive to utilize FVA to comply with government guidelines for the debt‐to‐equity ratio and to ease a potential hold‐up problem by influential creditors.     

The debt market relevance of management earnings forecasts: evidence from before and during the credit crisis

We investigate the credit market’s response via changes in credit default swap (CDS) spreads to management earnings forecasts and evaluate the importance of these forecasts relative to earnings news during the periods before and during the recent credit crisis. We document that credit markets react significantly to management forecast news and that the reactions to forecast news are stronger than to actual earnings news. Consistent with the asymmetric payoffs to debt holders, the forecast news is mainly relevant for firms with poor credit rating or announcing bad news. We also show that the relevance of management forecasts to credit markets is particularly strong during periods of high uncertainty, as experienced during the recent credit crisis.