Popular theories of financial risk management indicate that nonfinancial corporations may use derivatives to lower the expected costs of financial distress, to coordinate cash flows with investment policy, or because of agency conflicts between managers and owners. Using a new database of 7,319...

This paper presents international evidence on the use of financial derivatives for a sample of 7,292 non-financial firms from 48 countries including the U.S. Across all countries, 59.8% of the firms use derivatives in general, while 43.6% use currency derivatives, 32.5% interest rate...

It has been viewed as an unsolved puzzle that only for a small number of firms a significant impact of foreign exchange rate risk on firm value could be detected empirically. This paper investigates whether the results of previous studies can be explained by the fact that only the linear...

This paper examines whether the introduction of the Euro in 1999 was associated with lower stock return volatility, market risk exposures and foreign exchange rate risk exposures for 12,821 nonfinancial firms in Europe, the United States, and Japan. We show that though the Euro led to a...

Many interest rates are as volatile as exchange rates and thus represent an equally important source of risk for corporations. While this is true not only for financial institutions, but for other corporations as well, little is known about the interest rate exposure of nonfinancial firms....

Firm value is influenced in many direct and indirect ways by financial risks which consist of unexpected changes in foreign exchange rates, interest rates and commodity prices. The fact that a significant number of corporations are committing resources to risk management activities is, however,...

This paper presents strong evidence that existing studies overestimate the impact of CEOs on the performance of the firms they lead. Ours is a comprehensive study of more than 3,692 CEOs in 2,103 firms in 22 countries, and for the period 1991-2019. Our objective is to assess the direct impact of...

This paper shows that defined benefit pension and health care plans are important for firm leverage around the world. While consolidating off-balance sheet post-retirement plans typically increases effective leverage by 32%, firms reduce their level of regular debt by only 22 cents for every...

We analyze the impact of the introduction of credit default swaps (CDS) on real decision making within the firm and the influence of firms' local economic and legal environments on that impact. We extend the model of Bolton and Oehmke (2011) to take into account uncertainty about whether the...

This paper investigates the motivations and practice of nonfinancial firms with regard to using financial options in their risk management activities. To this end, it provides a comprehensive account of the existing empirical evidence on the use of derivatives in general and options in...