Working Paper No. 09-30 Creditor Control of Free Cash Flow

نویسنده

  • Rocco Huang
چکیده

With free cash flows, borrowers can accumulate cash or voluntarily pay down debts. However, sometimes creditors impose a mandatory repayment covenant called “excess cash flow sweep” in loan contracts to force borrowers to repay debts ahead of schedule. About 17% of borrowers in our sample (1995-2006) have this covenant attached to at least one of their loans. We find that the sweep covenant is more likely to be imposed on borrowers with higher leverage (i.e., where risk shifting by equity holders is more likely). The results are robust to including borrower fixed effects or using industry median leverage as a proxy. The covenant is more common also in borrowers where equity holders appear to have firmer control, e.g., when more shares are controlled by institutional block holders, when firms are incorporated in states with laws more favorable to hostile takeovers, or when equity holders place higher valuation on excess cash holdings. These determinants suggest that the sweep covenant may be motivated by creditor-shareholder conflicts. Finally, we show that the covenant has real effects: borrowers affected by the sweep covenant indeed repay more debts using excess cash flows, and they spend less in capital investment and pay out fewer dividends to shareholders. * Email: [email protected] I have benefited from helpful discussions with Viral Acharya, Mitchell Berlin, and Greg Nini. I would particularly like to thank Greg Nini, David C. Smith, and Amir Sufi for generously making available the credit agreement contracts they collected. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. This paper is available free of charge at http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-anddata/publications/working-papers/.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Impact of Institutional Ownership and Board Independence on the Relationship Between Excess Free Cash Flow and Earnings Management

However, the free cash flows scale is important for the financial health of the company, but it has also its own limitations. Moreover, it’s not immune from accounting tricks. Free cash flows can be considered as a measure of value for shareholders of listed companies on Tehran Stock Exchange. The managers of these companies have tended to use the earnings management for managing the free cash ...

متن کامل

Creditor Rights and Aggregate Factors in Loan Terms

It is well known that conflicts of interests between borrowers and creditors can raise the cost of external financing. In this paper we provide new evidence that borrower-creditor conflicts of interests also affect the sensitivity of debt financing to aggregate business conditions. In the presence of incomplete contracts, creditors cannot fully observe or verify diversion of free cash flow by b...

متن کامل

Surplus Free Cash Flow and Earnings Management: The Moderating Role of Auditor Size

This Study seeks to scrutinize whether surplus free cash flow is correlated with earnings management, if auditor size moderates this relationship. To do so, modified Jones discretionary accrual model (1995) and audit firm size are used as audit quality indicator to measure earnings management. The research hypotheses are built upon a sample of 103 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange d...

متن کامل

Free Cash Flow, Institutional Ownership and Long-Term Performance

Performance appraisal is a process which help shareholders make informed and optimal investment decisions. In recent decades, a long stream of research has devoted particular attention to the importance and impact of financial decisions on firm performance and firm value. The present study thus is primarily concerned with investigating the association between free cash flow and institutional ow...

متن کامل

Developing revised Fama-French Five-Factor models by including dividend rate, cash holdings, and Free cash flow to equity: evidence of Tehran stock exchange

Prediction of stock returns has always been one of the most important issues in finance. Investors have attracted to use of Fama-French Five-Factor Model (FFFFM) as one of the powerful methods for pricing financial assets and predicting the stock returns. This research investigates the predictability of stock returns by including some important firms features namely cash holdings, dividend rate...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009