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Managerial discretion and optimal financing policies with cash flow uncertainty

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Author Info
Alessandro Fiaschi ()
Abstract

Building on the work of Stulz (1990), this paper analyzes the impact of managerial discretion on optimal leverage within an agency cost model of corporate financing. Under the assumption that stockholders do not know with certainty the mean of the cash flow distribution, we argue that leverage fails to control for the amount of cash the manager can misappropriate in personal projects. We develop a model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts that as expected earnings uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. In a second part, we test this proposition on a panel of non–financial UK firms, by investigating the determinants of firms’ performance and allowing for endogeneity of capital structure decisions. The estimates confirm that earnings uncertainty, as measured by the volatility in monthly consensus forecasts of individual companies’ earnings per share, negatively affects corporate leverage. Furthermore, new empirical support is found to the agency cost view that corporate performance is positively correlated with leverage when poorly managed firms are selected.

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Paper provided by Doctoral School of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome in its series Working Papers with number 3.

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Length: 55 pages
Date of creation: Feb 2009
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Handle: RePEc:dsc:wpaper:3

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Web page: http://phdschool-economics.dse.uniroma1.it/website/
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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D92 - Microeconomics - - Intertemporal Choice and Growth - - - Intertemporal Firm Choice and Growth, Investment, or Financing
E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Capital; Investment; Capacity
G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Capital and Ownership Structure

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