We show that merger activity and particularly waves are significantly driven by risk management considerations. Increases in cash flow uncertainty encourage firms to vertically integrate and this contributes to the start of merger waves. These effects are incremental to previously identified...

Purchase obligations are forward contracts with suppliers and are used more broadly than traded commodity derivatives. This paper is the first to document that these contracts are a risk management tool and have a material impact on corporate hedging activity. Firms that expand their risk...

This paper investigates how firms manage risk by examining the relationship between financial and operational hedging using a sample of bank holding companies. Risk management theory holds that capital market imperfections make cash flow volatility costly. I investigate whether financial firms...

Purchase obligations are forward contracts with suppliers and are used more broadly than traded commodity derivatives. This paper is the first to document that these contracts are a risk management tool and have a material impact on corporate hedging activity. Firms that expand their risk...

Over the last two decades, share repurchases have emerged as the dominant payout channel, offering a more flexible means of returning excess cash to investors. However, little is known about the costs associated with payout-related financial flexibility. Using a unique identification strategy,...

Dynamic panel models play a natural role in several important areas of corporate finance, but the combination of fixed effects and lagged dependent variables introduces serious econometric bias. Several methods of counteracting these biases are available and these methodologies have been tested...

This study shows that firms regard stock price fragility - exposure to non-fundamental demand shocks stemming from the composition of equity ownership - as a salient corporate risk. We model ex-ante corporate responses to higher potential for future stock market misvaluation and then empirically...

Recent research has emphasized the impact of transaction costs on firm leverage adjustments. We recognize that cashflow realizations can provide opportunities to adjust leverage at relatively low marginal cost. We find that a firm's cashflow features affect not only the leverage target, but also...