IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpwp/09-30.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Creditor control of free cash flow

Author

Listed:
  • Rocco Huang

Abstract

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 percent of borrowers in the authors' sample (1995-2006) have this covenant attached to at least one of their loans. The author finds 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, the author shows 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Rocco Huang, 2009. "Creditor control of free cash flow," Working Papers 09-30, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:09-30
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2009/wp09-30.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Loans; Debt;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:09-30. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Beth Paul (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbphus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.