If a firm has information pertinent to its own dividend stream that is not made available to its shareholders, it may be in the interests of the firm and its shareholders to adopt a financial hedging policy. This is in contrast with the Modigliani-Miller Theorem, which implies that, with informational symmetry, such financial hedging is irrelevant. In certain cases, hedging policies are identif...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the interaction between hedging, financing, and investment decisions. This work is relevant in that theoretical predictions are not necessarily identical to those in the case where only two decisions are being made. We argue that the way in which hedging affects the firms’ financing and investing decisions differs for firms with different ...

This paper investigates the hedging effectiveness of a dynamic moving window OLS hedging model, formed using wavelet decomposed time-series. The wavelet transform is applied to calculate the appropriate dynamic minimum-variance hedge ratio for various hedging horizons for a number of assets. The effectiveness of the dynamic multiscale hedging strategy is then tested, both inand out-of-sample, u...

There is little empirical evidence about risk management heterogeneity across firm types. I evaluate a policy that shifts oil price risk in highway procurement from the private sector to the government, reducing the cost of hedging to zero. In a tripledifferences design using data from Kansas and Iowa, I show that firms value hedging oil price risk between the auction and commencement of work. ...

Financial researchers initially regarded hedging activities as a means to reduce total firm risk, which often is defined in terms of cash flow volatility. More recently, researchers have focused on the strategic allocation of risk. Direct tests of risk allocation have been problematic, however, because hedging data are rarely available and, when available, are specific only to a single...

The calendar spread options (CSOs) on agricultural commodities, most notably corn, soybeans and wheat, allow market participants to hedge the roll-over risk of futures contracts. Despite the interest from agricultural businesses, there is lack of both theoretical and empirical research on pricing and hedging performances of CSOs. We propose to price and hedge CSOs under geometric Brownian motio...

We examine the relationship between derivatives hedging, risk-taking, and managerial compensation incentives from an enterprise risk management perspective in U.S. publicly traded property-liability insurance companies. We find that derivatives usage is negatively related to various risks, supporting the stabilizing effect of derivatives use for hedging purposes. Our evidence also shows that de...

This paper estimates optimal hedging ratios for a Finnish spring wheat producer under price and yield uncertainty. The contract available for hedging fixes the price and quantity at the time of sowing for a delivery at harvest. Autoregressive models are used to obtain point forecasts for the conditional mean price and price volatility at harvest. Expected yield and yield volatility are estimate...

The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utiliz...

In the broad literature of corporate risk management classic models of optimal hedging assume a one-period hedging decision, and therefore no financing need arises to maintain the hedge position. The multi-period models are usually based on the assumption of no liquidity constraints, and accordingly the eventual financing need can always be met from the market. As a consequence of the recent cr...