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This paper uses risk-shifting models to analyze some potential policy responses to asset price booms and bubbles. We argue that the presence of risk shifting can generate many of the features of such booms and so is a reasonable framework to explore these issues. Our analysis offers several insights. First, we find that determining whether there is indeed a bubble in asset markets is unimportant, since risk-shifting leads to the same inefficiencies regardless of whether it gives rise to a bubble or not. Second, while risk shifting offers a reason for intervention, we find the leading proposals for interventions against booms have ambiguous welfare implications in our model. Specifically, we show tighter monetary policy may exacerbate some inefficiencies due to risk shifting even as it mitigates others, and that leverage restrictions may fan asset prices and exacerbate excessive leverage rather than curb it.

We show that risk-mitigating incentives dominate risk-shifting incentives in fragile banks. We study security trading by banks, as banks can easily and quickly change their risk exposure within their security portfolio. For identification, we exploit different crisis shocks and supervisory ISIN-bank-month-level data. Less capitalized banks take relatively less risk after financial stress shocks. Results hold within identical regulatory capital risk weights categories. Moreover, additional tests suggest that banks’ own incentives, rather than supervision, are the main drivers. Results hold for the different crisis shocks since 2007/08, including the COVID-19 one. A model of bank behavior rationalizes our findings.

We examine the relationship between deviating from the benchmark and subsequent performance for hedge funds. We propose a simple new measure of benchmark deviations, termed the Dispersion Contribution Index (DCI), which is based on a fund's return-distance from the mean return of same-style funds. We find that funds which deviate the most from their benchmark tend to underperform relative to their less distinctive peers, after accounting for their risk profile and various fund characteristics. This relative underperformance stems primarily from the higher subsequent risk exposure associated with pursuing a unique strategy. Our results are indicative of risk shifting by fund managers attempting to maximize the value of their compensation contracts.

Regulators and researchers tend to focus primarily on the risk-shifting benefits of audit liability insurance. We obtain field data from the US audit insurance industry (16 interviews and 83 survey responses) to examine whether insurers also possess characteristics favorable to transferring their private risk management knowledge to the audit firms they insure. Possessing such characteristics would enable insurers to use their relative knowledge advantage to provide a benefit to audit firms beyond risk shifting. Thus, examining this issue helps broaden our understanding of insurers’ role in auditing. We examine our data through the lens of the knowledge transfer theory and find evidence that audit liability insurers have the motivation and capacity to accumulate and transfer risk management knowledge to the audit firms they insure. We find that audit firms, particularly the small resource-constrained firms (i.e., non-Big 4 and non-second-tier), rely on and benefit from their insurers’ risk management knowledge. We also find that insurers transfer such knowledge through multiple mechanisms, including free consultative services, policy premium incentives, and CPE classes. Our results highlight the important role of audit insurers as transferors of risk management knowledge to audit firms. Broadly, our results extend knowledge transfer theory and suggest areas for future research in US and international contexts.

We find strong empirical support for the risk-shifting mechanism to account for the puzzling negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns. First, equity holders take on investments with high idiosyncratic risk when their firms are in distress and receive less monitoring from institutional holders as well as when the aggregate economy is in a bad state. Second, the strategically increased idiosyncratic volatility decreases equity betas, particularly in bad states when the market risk premium is high. The negative covariance between the equity beta and the market risk premium causes low and negative returns and alphas in firms with high idiosyncratic volatility. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance.

We provide evidence regarding mutual funds’ motivation to hold lottery stocks. Funds with higher managerial ownership invest less in lottery stocks, suggesting that managers themselves do not prefer such stocks. The evidence instead supports that managers cater to fund investors’ preference for such stocks. In particular, funds with more lottery holdings attract larger flows after portfolio disclosure compared with their peers, and poorly performing funds tend to engage in risk shifting by increasing their lottery holdings toward year-ends. Funds’ aggregate holdings of lottery stocks contribute to their overpricing.

In this paper, we assess the relationship between risk-shifting of mutual funds, measured as benchmark-adjusted factor-based investment style change following a structural break, and their risk-adjusted performance. We isolate only the breaks in style risk beyond those embedded in the funds’ benchmark index to eliminate any natural style risk changes resulting from varying company fundamentals over time. We group style risk changes into extreme (style rotation), moderate (style drifting), and weak (style-strengthening/weakening) and assess which investment style category is most profitable to shift in to and out of. Our findings show that funds that exhibit breaks generate overall better risk-adjusted performance than those that do not. Funds that are most successful in risk-shifting have both statistically and economically distinct risk-adjusted performance, make shifts towards small/large/value/growth style combinations rather than mid-cap and blend style, exhibit breaks less frequently and has more moderate risk-shifts than funds that are unsuccessful.

We examine whether banks manage firms' climate transition risks via corporate loan securitization. Results show that banks are more likely to securitize loans granted to firms that become more carbon-intensive. The effect is more pronounced if banks have a lower willingness to adjust loan terms. Exploiting the election of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock that lowers transition risk, we show that banks respond by a lower securitization of loans given to firms that become more carbon-intensive. This is mainly driven by banks that have no or low preferences for sustainable lending and domestic lenders.

Η παρούσα διδακτορική διατριβή επικεντρώνεται στη διερεύνηση του ρόλου της επαναδιαπραγμάτευσης του χρέους ως μέσο άμβλυνσης ή επίλυσης του προβλήματος μετακύλισης κινδύνου, το οποίο εισήχθη στη διεθνή βιβλιογραφία από τους Jensen and Meckling (1976). Το εν λόγω πρόβλημα ανακύπτει από την ύπαρξη κινήτρου των μετόχων μιας επιχείρησης να επωφεληθούν από επενδύσεις υψηλού κινδύνου σε βάρος των πιστωτών, και αποτελεί μια από τις κύριες πηγές σύγκρουσης συμφερόντων μεταξύ μετόχων και πιστωτών. Η μετακύλιση κινδύνου ανήκει σε μια ευρύτερη κατηγορία ενεργειών με ονομασία ‘κρυφές ενέργειες’, επειδή ο δανειολήπτης, εν προκειμένω ο μέτοχος, προχωρεί σε μια επενδυτική ενέργεια εν αγνοία του δανειστή (Ziegler, 1998). Σε γενικό πλαίσιο, η παρούσα διδακτορική διατριβή συμβάλλει σε ποικίλους τομείς της βιβλιογραφίας. Πρώτον, συνεισφέρουμε στη σχετική βιβλιογραφία δείχνοντας ότι η επαναδιαπραγμάτευση του χρέους μπορεί να θεωρηθεί μία εναλλακτική λύση σε σχέση με τους έως τώρα καλά μελετημένους τρόπους (π.χ. χρήση των warrants, μετατρέψιμο χρέος, βραχυπρόθεσμο χρέος) για την άμβλυνση του προβλήματος μετακύλισης κινδύνου. Δεύτερον, η μελέτη μας συμπληρώνει και επεκτείνει προηγούμενες μελέτες σχετικές με την τιμολόγηση του χρέους. Η υπάρχουσα θεωρητική βιβλιογραφία εξετάζει είτε το πρόβλημα μετακύλισης κινδύνου (Leland, 1998; Ericsson, 2000; D´ecamps and Djembissi, 2007; Djembissi, 2011), είτε την επαναδιαπραγμάτευση του χρέους (Andeson and Sundaresan, 1996; Mella Barral and Perraudin, 1997; Fan and Sundaresan, 2000). Εξ’ όσων γνωρίζουμε, αυτή είναι η πρώτη μελέτη που αναπτύσσει ένα αναλυτικό μοντέλο συνεχούς χρόνου, το οποίο συνδυάζει τις δυο περιοχές. Τρίτον, συμβάλλουμε στις εμπειρικές μελέτες που αφορούν στη μετακύλιση κινδύνου, δείχνοντας ότι οι εταιρείες που αντιμετωπίζουν οικονομική δυσπραγία αλλά επαναδιαπραγματεύονται τις δανειακές τους υποχρεώσεις αντιστρέφουν την τάση για ανάληψη υπερβολικού κινδύνου. Τέλος, η μελέτη αυτή είναι η πρώτη που συνδέει το είδος επαναδιαπραγμάτευσης του χρέους με τα κίνητρα των μετόχων για μετακύλιση κινδύνου, εξετάζοντας ένα μεγάλο δείγμα 30.108 επαναδιαπραγματεύσεων δανειακών συμβάσεων.

Business groups often contain banks or near banks that can protect group firms from economic shocks. A group bank subordinate to other group firms can become an “organ bank” that selflessly bails out distressed group firms and anticipates a government bailout. A group bank subordinating other group firms can extend loans to suppress their risk-taking to default risk, preserving risk-averse low-productivity zombie firms. Actual business groups can fall between these polar cases. Subordinated group banks magnify risk-taking; subordinating banks suppress risk-taking; yet both distortions promote business group firms’ survival. Limiting intragroup income and risk shifting, severing banks from business groups, or dismantling business groups may mitigate both distortions; but also limits business groups’ internal markets, thought important where external markets work poorly.

The asset allocation decision is one of the most important decisions made by defined benefit pension schemes, with a major effect on the scheme contribution rate, funding ratio and financial position of the sponsoring company. We investigate the determinants of the equity allocation of UK pension funds using a panel of 1,304 observations on 125 companies that were members of the FTSE 100 over the 2003-2019 period. We find that seven variables have a significant effect on the allocation between equities and bonds – maturity (as measured by the effective duration of scheme liabilities), default risk, leverage of the sponsor, size of the sponsor (or the scheme), whether the scheme is closed to future contributions, whether the scheme has significant overseas liabilities, and a time trend. Our sensitivity analysis finds that the biggest effects on the asset allocation come from scheme maturity, the scheme’s funding ratio and a time trend.

When firms approach distress, whether they engage in asset substitution (risk shifting) or rebuild equity (risk management) may depend on their access to capital markets. The property-casualty insurance industry has two features that make it ideal for testing this hypothesis: (1) the main losses for insurers are exogenous events like hurricanes that provide a strong instrument for financial distress; and (2) many insurers are organized as mutual companies, which cannot issue stock. Consistent with the importance of capital constraints, stock companies issue new equity following a negative shock, while mutual companies increase the riskiness of their investment portfolios.

Was the mortgage boom fueled by optimism around house prices, or did misaligned incentives in the mortgage industry also play a role? In this paper, we provide novel evidence of a role for misaligned incentives. We document that private mortgage insurance (PMI) companies dramatically expanded insurance issuance on high-risk mortgages purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the tail-end of the housing boom, without changing pricing and despite knowledge of heightened housing risk. The PMI expansion facilitated an unprecedented increase in Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's purchases of high-risk mortgages, extending the mortgage boom into 2007 and precipitating their collapse as well as that of the PMI industry. We argue that this unraveling reflects a general moral hazard problem associated with insurance providers coupled with misaligned incentives in the government-backed portion of the mortgage market.

We provide evidence regarding mutual funds' motivation to hold lottery stocks. Funds with higher managerial ownership invest less in lottery stocks, suggesting that managers themselves do not prefer such stocks. The evidence instead supports that managers cater to fund investors' preference for such stocks. In particular, funds with more lottery holdings attract larger flows after portfolio disclosure compared to their peers, and poorly performing funds tend to engage in risk shifting by increasing their lottery holdings towards year-ends. Funds' aggregate holdings of lottery stocks contribute to their overpricing.

This paper uses granular bond portfolio data to study how banking systems across the European Union (EU) adjust their asset holdings in response to regulatory solvency shocks. We also study the impact of these shocks at financial intermediaries on the prices of bonds in their portfolio. Despite the creation of a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) in the EU, we find that risk-shifting interacts with regulatory arbitrage motives to explain how banks adjust their portfolios after adverse solvency shocks. After regulatory solvency declines, banks increase their exposure to domestic bonds, including higher yielding but zero risk-weight sovereign bonds. The increase in banking system risk might therefore be even larger than the decline in risk-weighted solvency ratios suggests. Distress in the banking system also feeds back onto bond prices. Bonds owned by less-well capitalized banking systems trade at a discount relative to otherwise similar bonds owned by better capitalized intermediaries.

We show that risk mitigating incentives dominate risk shifting incentives in fragile banks. Risk shifting could be particularly severe in banking since it is the most opaque industry and banks are one of the most leveraged corporations with very low skin in the game. To analyze this question, we exploit security trading by banks during financial crises, as banks can easily and quickly change their risk exposure within their security portfolio. However, in contrast with the risk shifting hypothesis, we find that less capitalized banks take relatively less risk after financial market stress shocks. We show this using the supervisory ISIN-bank-month level dataset from Italy with all securities for each bank. Our results are over and above capital regulation as we show lower reach-for-yield effects by less capitalized banks within government bonds (with zero risk weights) or within securities with the same rating and maturity in the same month (which determines regulatory capital). Effects are robust to controlling for the covariance with the existence portfolio, and less capitalized banks, if anything, reduce concentration risk. Further, effects are stronger when uncertainty is higher, despite that risk shifting motives may be then higher. Moreover, three separate tests – based on different accounting portfolios (trading book versus held to maturity), the distribution of capital and franchise value – suggest that bank own incentives, instead of supervision, are the main drivers. Results are confirmed if we consider other sources of balance sheet fragility and different measures of risk-taking. Finally, evidence from the recent COVID-19 shock corroborates findings from the Global Financial Crisis and the Euro Area Sovereign Crisis.

We survey institutional investors on the convertible bond issuance decision. Investors believe that convertibles are preferred over equity in order to avoid equity dilution. We also find support for traditional convertible bond issuing theories, such as the backdoor equity, sequential financing, risk shifting, and risk disagreement models. Investors attribute little importance to factors that make convertible bonds more attractive for hedge funds such as volatility and dividend payments on the underlying stocks. This latter result is likely related to the smaller role that convertible arbitrage activity started to play in this market.

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and their directors. The majority of directorships are held by extremely busy independent directors. These directors are sought by funds because they have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high-quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with investor withdrawals. Moreover, funds with busy independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, abuse discretionary liquidity restrictions, or engage in performance-based risk shifting.

Debt-type compensation (inside debt) exacerbates the divergence in risk preferences between the chief executive officer (CEO) and shareholders and, in turn, affects capital structure decisions. An excessively risk-averse CEO tends to use less debt than the shareholders desire, reduce debt quickly when the firm is overlevered, but is reluctant to increase debt when the firm is underlevered. We find that higher CEO's inside debt ratio (i.e., inside debt as a percentage of total incentive compensation) is associated with lower firm leverage and faster (slower) leverage adjustments toward the shareholders’ desired level for overlevered (underlevered) firms. The CEO's inside debt ratio most conducive to capital structure rebalancing is around 10% of the firm's market debt ratio.

We study whether industrial firms risk-shift in response to distress risk increases induced through hurricane strikes. Using new proxies capturing deliberate managerial decisions about the risk of a firm’s operating segment portfolio, differences tests suggest that hurricane strikes prompt moderately, but not highly, distressed firms to skew their asset mixes toward riskier segments by shutting down low-risk, high-average-Q segments. In turn, the moderately distressed firms observe abnormally high failure rates after a hurricane strike. Employing covenant violation data, we offer further evidence that creditor control prevents highly distressed firms from raising their risk. Our conclusions extend those of other studies by suggesting that moderate distress risk levels can lead the managers of industrial firms to not only engage in risk-taking, but, in fact, in risk-shifting.

Nearly 30% of US banks employ at least one board member who currently serves (or has previously served) the Federal Reserve in a public service role. Public service roles take the form of Federal Reserve directorships or memberships in Federal Reserve advisory councils. We show that connections between banks and the Federal Reserve are linked to decreases in the sensitivity of bank leverage to risk. Further, connected banks extract larger public subsidies by shifting risk to the financial safety-net. Jointly, our results suggest that interactions between banks and regulators reduce supervisory effectiveness.

This paper introduces a new instrument in the context of hedge fund seeding, which we call fees-for-guarantee swap, with the aim of alleviating the early-stage funds (ESF)managers’financial constraint caused by severe asymmetric information between investors and managers. The swap plays a role in enhancing the ESFs manager’s credibility by swapping part of her fees for an insurance on the behalf of seeding investors, whom would be fully refunded once the fund defaults. We set up a dynamic continuous-time framework within which closed-form prices for seed capital, guarantee costs and other claims have been derived. Our numerical findings indicate that incentive compensations, managerial ownership and hedge funds liquidation risks not only inhibit ESFs managers’ risk-shifting incentive but align interests among ESFs manager, seeder and insurer as well.

A relative large proportion of the academic literature about the agency dilemma studies corporate governance or the instruments that can balance the incentives of shareholders and debt holders. This article studies a balance sheet instrument, the mandatory convertible bond, as a means to increase the value for shareholders, without reducing the bondholders claim. Following the options valuations theories, one way to increase the value for shareholders is to increase the risk of the firm that in turn reduces the value for bondholders. The results show that after the issuance of mandatory convertible bonds, companies reduce the return required by bondholders and at the same time increase its equity volatility and the potential shareholder value.

This paper investigates the performance consequences of the risk shifting behavior shown by domestic equity mutual funds through the analysis of monthly portfolio holdings. The objective of this paper is to assess the implications of risk shifting for mutual fund investors. Specifically, we study the performance consequences of different mechanisms of risk shifting, such as the change in the composition between equity and cash holdings and the change of the systematic or idiosyncratic risk within the equity positions. We find that funds that increase their risk level obtain significantly better performance than funds with stable or reduced risk levels. This finding is robust when controlling for fund characteristics such as past performance and fund size. Additionally, we examine whether the performance consequences of risk shifting depends on fund manager characteristics and find that manager gender, education and level of specialization are revealed as important variables to differentiate the performance consequences of risk shifting.

This paper examines an episode when policy response to a financial crisis effectively incentivized financial institutions to reallocate their portfolios toward safe assets. Following a shift to a regime of enhanced regulation and scaled-down public assistance during the savings and loan crisis in 1989, I find that thrifts with a high probability of failure increased their composition of safe assets relative to thrifts with a low probability of failure. The findings also show a shift to safe assets among stock thrifts relative to mutual thrifts, thereby providing evidence of risk-shifting from equity-holders to debt-holders of stock thrifts prior to the regulatory reforms. These findings suggest that for recent policies aimed at reducing moral hazard to succeed (such as the Orderly Liquidation Authority under Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act), credible signals around government assistance should be provided to shareholders of financial institutions. To identify the effect of the policy change I develop a new Bayesian estimation method for causal studies.

The well-being of older people in society depends in part on their having sufficient financial resources to provide for their everyday needs, and to enable them to maintain their health and relationships. Pensions are therefore directly implicated in the well-being of older members of the population and hence are a potential source of significant social and societal risks. This paper critiques the role of accountants and accounting technologies in the treatment of the social and societal risks inherent in the UK occupational pensions’ landscape in relation to four characteristics of pensions’ security, namely that pensions should be predictable, stable, long-lasting and comprehensive. The UK pensions’ landscape has undergone rapid and fundamental change in recent years. A range of examples drawn from state, public and private sector occupational schemes are discussed. Across all sectors, while some people have gained, others have lost valuable pension benefits. In occupational schemes, employer costs have been reduced and pension liabilities have been de-risked, usually involving risk sharing with employees or risk shifting towards employees. The role played by accountants and other business advisers in quantifying, analysing and mitigating this work is critiqued. The rhetoric of de-risking, security and enablement inherent in the various pension changes, where the reality is often different, is examined and implications for social and societal risk explored.

We present a model of a bank with endogenous risk choices, where delegated monitoring by an active market in subordinate debt helps in containing the bank's risk shifting in the presence of deposit insurance. In comparison to static ex ante contracting, an active market enables continuous monitoring by subordinate debt to penalise the bank's risk shifting. The model is instrumental in deriving optimal level of subordinate debt required to achieve equilibrium where banks choose risk levels consistent with the first best as envisaged by a social planner. The optimal quantity of subordinate debt further eliminates any risk shifting associated even with risk insensitive premiums.

This paper provides the first theoretical and empirical analysis of how taxation shapes the joint allocation of risk and profits inside the multinational firm. Theoretically, we identify three mechanisms through which corporate taxes may shape the within-firm allocation of risk: (1) transfer pricing rules requiring risk to be compensated with higher expected returns create incentives to shift risk to low-tax jurisdictions as a means to shift profits; (2) risk-averse owners create incentives to allocate risk to high-tax affiliates to maximize risk-sharing with governments; (3) limited loss offset creates incentives to shift risk to affiliates in other countries. Empirically, we show that multinational firms disproportionately allocate risk to low-tax countries and that the key mechanism is the nexus between risk and profits established by transfer pricing rules. Within-firm differences in risk explain a significant fraction of the well-established correlation between profits and tax rates suggesting that risk shifting is a quantitatively non-negligible channel for profit shifting.