A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the implicit protection. However, if they increase volatility too much they may induce the guarantee-extending parties to "walk away". I derive the optimal risk management rule in such a framework and show that it allows high volatility choices, while net worth is high. However, risk limits tighten abruptly when the firm's net worth declines below an endogenously determined threshold. Hence, the model reproduces the qualitative features of existing risk management rules, and can account for phenomena such as "flight to quality".
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
15058.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15058
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Find related papers by JEL classification: G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Capital and Ownership Structure G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Graciela L. Kaminsky & Carmen M. Reinhart, 2001.
"Bank Lending and Contagion: Evidence from the Asian Crisis,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Regional and Global Capital Flows: Macroeconomics Causes and Consequences, NBER-EASE Volume 10, pages 73-116
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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