Investment decisions and debt financing under information uncertainty

This study examines how information uncertainty influences investment decisions. In contrast to prior studies, which assume no information uncertainty, our model includes a discrepancy in valuing debt between shareholders and debtholders at the time of debt issuance. We derive the values of corporate securities and the optimal investment threshold and coupon under information uncertainty. We show that compared with the absence of information uncertainty, debtholders value debt less than shareholders do, and hence, shareholders should contribute more investment funds. Debt financing restraints due to information uncertainty lead to delayed investment. We find that information uncertainty plays a mitigating role in shareholder-debtholder conflicts over investment policy. Moreover, the information uncertainty costs that shareholders incur increase sharply with the level of information uncertainty.     

Excessive risk taking and the maturity structure of debt

This paper analyses the effect of short term debt on equityholders' risk taking decisions. We show that if short term debt limits the expropriation of debtholders, it also implies a lower leverage, which prevents the firm from increasing tax shields. We then examine the incentive of equityholders to increase the firm risk when debtholders hold the option to swap a perpetual coupon bond with short term debt. We find that this option mitigates equityholders' risk shifting incentives. Compared to standard short term debt, this restructuring option deters debtholders expropriation, it increases leverage and it reduces the loss in tax shields due to asset substitution.     

Contingent capital,capital structure and investment

We examine the interaction between investment and financing policies in a dynamic model for a firm with existing assets-in-place and a growth option, of which investment cost is financed with equity and contingent convertible bonds (CoCos). We attempt to clarify how CoCos impact on investment timing, capital structure and inefficiencies arising from debt overhang and asset substitution. We show that there is a conversion ratio (the fraction of equity allocated to CoCo holders upon conversion) to eliminate the inefficiencies. Our conclusions predict that debt leverage decreases with investment option payoff factor and the average appreciation rate of the cash flow. In contrast to traditional corporate finance theory saying that a firm's value decreases globally with business risk, our model indicates that it might first decrease and then increase with asset volatility.     

Investment and capital structure decisions with strategic debt service under asymmetric information

This paper examines the agency problem due to manager-shareholder conflicts in a real option framework by incorporating strategic debt service. We show that when the equityholders’ bargaining power is weak, the optimal coupon is larger and the manager overinvests the project relative to the case without renegotiation, while the results are totally opposite when the bargaining power is strong. An increase in equityholders’ bargaining power reduces the manager’s value and the total social value. Especially, the social value can be improved by debt renegotiation when the systematic risk is high, which provides an explanation why Chinese government encourage the market-oriented debt restructuring.     

Entry,financing, and bankruptcy decisions: The limited liability effect

A firm, which has a privileged right to undertake an irreversible investment project, simultaneously determines whether to exercise this project and also how many bonds to issue in the presence of demand uncertainty. The firm will not exercise the project until its net value from investing immediately equals its option value from delaying investment. The firm’s choice of debt levels balances the tax advantage of debt against a cost associated with the event of bankruptcy. The effects of uncertainty, asset specificity, and the costs to purchase capital later on a firm’s entry, financing, and bankruptcy decisions are examined and compared with those in the literature.     

Debt renegotiation under reputation concerns and tolerance for failure

We propose a career concern model where a privately informed entrepreneur reports the firm financial situation. On this basis, the creditor may offer debt renegotiation. Due to reputation concerns, the entrepreneur may feel reluctant to restructure and may manipulate information. We analyze how creditor attitude towards failure and entrepreneurs reputation concerns interact and influence the restructuring decision. We show that debt renegotiation under more lenient conditions discourages manipulation because entrepreneurs are ensured that their reputation will not suffer from revealing financial difficulties. Intolerant creditors make entrepreneurs more concerned about reputation weakening their incentives to restructure, leading to inefficient continuation of investments.     

基于资产专用性的企业融资决策研究

本文采用Williamson的思路,建立了资产专用性与交易成本、生产成本因素在内的综合交易成本分析模型。分析发现,相对于债务融资而言,股权融资有利于避免按市场规则强行清算带来的专用性资产价值损失,运用包络定理证明专用性程度高的资产具有削减生产成本的作用,专用性程度高的资产以股权融资为佳。     

Investment and financing choices by time-inconsistent managers

This paper provides an analytically tractable continuous-time model in which a time-inconsistent manager can divert part of the firm’s cash flows as private benefits at the expense of outside shareholders. We endogenously determine the investment scale, investment threshold, optimal coupon and default threshold under managerial discretion. We demonstrate that time-inconsistent managers each have a trade-off between the timing and scale of investment.Among a number of important implications, by exploring agency costs of equity as deviations from the investment and financing policies that maximize equity value, our analysis reveals that a certain degree of time inconsistency in managerial preferences decreases the agency costs of equity. We also find that a naive manager more severely distorts the investment and financing policies than does a sophisticated manager, which leads to higher agency costs of equity. Finally, we document that the impacts of corporate governance variables, such as the managers’ property parameter and/or the level of managers’ ownership, depend on the managers’ beliefs regarding their future time-inconsistent behavior; this prediction provides novel empirical tests.     

Optimal Debt Contracts with Renegotiation

This paper sutudies the role of debt in committing a seller not to trade at a low price. We consider a discrete-time finite-horizon buyer–seller relationship. The seller makes an upfront relationship-specific investment, which is financed with debt. Debt then is repaid gradually to mitigate the hold-up risk. Even though debt is renegotiable, under the assumption that with a small probability renegotiation may fail and may lead to inefficient liquidation, debt still can be used as a commitment device. We solve for renegotiation proof dynamic debt contracts that are optimal for the seller and show that debt is repaid over the entire course of the relationship with declining repayments .     

利益相关者与资本结构决策

传统权衡理论中的破产成本主要考虑的是,由重组或清算所带来的法律成本和管理成本之类的直接破产成本,以及由股东和债权人之间的矛盾而引起的在企业财务危机期间发生的间接破产成本。现代权衡理论基于利益相关者的考虑拓展了以前的间接破产成本内涵,主要是考虑了企业财务危机或破产清算给其他利益相关者带来的危害。这不但使企业的资本结构决策渗入了更多的战略因素,而且可以解释现实中许多企业的看似保守的融资行为。     

Real options and contingent convertibles with regime switching

We consider a firm with no assets in place but an option to invest in a project. The investment is irreversible but delayable in a regime-switching economy. The firm issues equity, straight bonds (SBs) and contingent convertibles (CoCos). We provide the closed-form prices for the firm׳s securities and the pricing and timing of the option. Our numerical analyses discover that issuing CoCos instead of SBs induces much less agency cost of debt. The agency cost is higher in a boom economy than in recession but the difference is small. There is a unique CoCos׳ conversion ratio such that the agency cost arrives at the minimum value zero. The inefficiencies arising from asset substitution and debt overhang are much more significant in recession than in boom. Only if the conversion ratio is not too small, the two inefficiencies disappear during boom periods. While the effects of the conversion rate on optimal capital structure and firm value and those of supervision and jump intensity on optimal CoCos׳ coupon are ambiguous and weak, the stricter the supervision or the longer the economy remains in recession, the less the option value and the optimal SBs׳ coupon.     

Regulatory risk, market uncertainties, and firm financing choices: Evidence from U.S. Electricity Market Restructuring

Based on the universe of rate-regulated electric utilities in the U.S., we examine why firms alter their financing decisions when transitioning from a regulated to a competitive market regime. We find that the significant increase in regulatory risk after the passage of the Energy Policy Act, state-level restructuring legislations, and divestiture policies have reduced leverage by 15 percent. Policies that encouraged competition, and hence increased market uncertainty, lowered leverage by another 13 percent on average. The ability to exercise market power allowed some firms to counter this competitive threat. In aggregate, regulatory risk and market uncertainty variables reduce leverage between 24.6 and 26.7 percent. We also confirm findings in the literature that firms with higher profitability and higher asset growth have lower leverage, and those with more tangible assets are more levered. Firms with greater access to internal capital markets and those with a footloose customer segment use less debt, while those actively involved in trading power in the wholesale market use more debt.     

公司发行可转换债券融资的动机分析

公司使用可转换债券筹集外部资金既是作为普通债券的替代,增加转换特性来降低利息率从而保持现金流量,也是转换条款建立“延迟股权”,通过转换,以高于现行股票的价格出售。本文研究发现,公司发行可转换债券是为了减少由于股东和管理者以及股东和债权人之间冲突所引起的代理成本;为了降低由发行普通债券带来的高额预期财务危机成本和普通股发行中经常出现的严重负面公告效应;以及在投资者和管理者对公司面临的风险认识不同时,使其价值不易受公司风险变化的影响。     

环境规制、流动性风险与债务融资成本

环境规制会影响企业经营和银行对企业的风险评价,进而影响企业债务融资成本。本文以我国A股2012~2017年重污染行业上市公司为研究对象,研究了环境规制对债务融资成本的具体影响。研究结果显示,环境规制强度对重污染企业债务融资成本具有正向影响作用;且这种影响效应在小规模企业和非国有企业更加显著;进一步研究发现,环境规制通过流动性风险路径影响企业债务融资成本。本文的研究丰富了企业债务融资成本相关文献,对企业加强债务融资管理与政府实施环保政策具有一定的启示作用。     

The shadow costs of repos and bank liability structure

Making use of a structural model that allows for optimal liquidity management, we study the role that repos play in a bank׳s financing structure. In our model the bank׳s assets consist of illiquid loans and liquid reserves and are financed by a combination of repos, long-term debt, deposits and equity. Repos are a cheap source of funding, but they are subject to an exogenous rollover risk. We show that the use of repos inflicts two types of indirect (“shadow”) costs on the bank׳s shareholders: first, it induces the bank to maintain higher liquid reserves in order to alleviate the additional default risk; second, it adds to the cost of long-term debt financing. These shadow costs limit the bank׳s appetite for cheap but unstable repo funding. This effect is, however, weakened under poor returns on risky assets, access to deposit funding and the depositor preference rule. We also analyze the impact of a liquidity coverage ratio, payout restrictions and a leverage ratio on the bank׳s financing choices and show that all these tools are able to curb the bank׳s reliance on repos.     

Powerful CEOs,debt financing,and leasing in Chinese SMEs: Evidence from threshold model

This study investigates the impacts of CEO power on firm financing policies (i.e. debt financing and operating leasing) using the Caner and Hansen (2004) instrumental variable threshold regressions approach. The sample consists of a panel of 297 Chinese listed small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) over the period 2009–2012. The empirical results indicate that there are threshold effects in the CEO power-debt relationship and CEO power-operating lease relationship. In particular, we find that firms tend to use more debt financing (and operating leasing) when CEO power index below a certain threshold level; beyond the threshold level, CEO tends to manipulate firm capital structure to pursue their own interests, thus using less debt financing and operating leasing. In addition, our estimation results suggest a positive relationship between debt and operating leases when CEO power is smaller than certain threshold, while it becomes negative if the power index exceeds the threshold level.     

Asset specificity,capital intensity and capital structure: An empirical test

Capital investment and capital financing decisions interact. To resolve current controversies in investment-leverage-growth relationships requires an integrated industrial organization/financial economics empirical model of profit margins, capital investment intensity, leverage and risk. Using cumulative future losses in discontinued operations to measure the asset specificity of the firm's investments, empiricai results support a complementary (positive) relationship between debt and investment, the debt financing of verifiable contemporaneous growth, equity financing of future growth and the debt financing of specific assets. This evidence rejects the transactions cost theory of capital structure in Fortune 500 firms.     

Debt contracts and cooperative improvements

In this paper, we consider a dynamic game with imperfect information between a borrower and lender who must write a contract to produce a consumption good. In order to analyze the game, we introduce the concept of a coalitional perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium (cPBNE). We prove that equilibria exist and are efficient in a precise sense, and that deterministic contracts that resemble debt are optimal for a general class of economies. The cPBNE solution concept captures both the non-cooperative aspect of firm liquidation and the cooperative aspect of renegotiation.     

Financing constraints and the use of performance-sensitive debt

Performance-sensitive debt (PSD) is a popular financial instrument in the corporate private debt market. In a real-options setting, this paper aims to clarify how PSD impacts on investment policy, capital structure, and agency cost of financing constraints when the firm faces the upper limit of debt issuance. We show that the constrained leverage hardly depends on the performance sensitivity. In particular, our conclusions predict that PSD can decrease the severity of financing constraints relative to the fixed-coupon debt case and the loss of firm value arising from investment and financing distortions due to the presence of financing constraints. The higher the performance sensitivity, the less likely that the firm is financially constrained. These findings provide a novel investment-based explanation for issuance of PSD.     

Initial Financial Conditions,Unobserved Heterogeneity and the Survival of Nascent Canadian Manufacturing Firms

The firm dynamics literature has stressed productivity, size, and age effects in firm duration. Understanding the implications of financial state has largely been unexplored because of the lack of quality data on private entrant firms. This paper investigates the role of start‐up financial conditions (debt‐to‐asset ratio) on the duration of entrant manufacturing firms using a unique administrative firm‐level database called T2LEAP. The debt‐to‐asset ratio has an economically and statistically significant effect on firm hazard after controlling for usual covariates and unobserved heterogeneity. Further, a non‐monotonic relationship between firm hazard and leverage appears. Firm hazard varies positively with leverage for firms in the top two leverage quintiles, whereas hazard rates fall with leverage in the lower quintiles. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.