Hayong Yun

Risk Management and Firm Value: Evidence from Weather Derivatives

This paper examines the impact of financial innovation on firm value, investment, and financing decisions. More specifically, we examine the effect of the introduction of weather derivatives on electric and gas utilities, arguably some of the most weather-exposed businesses in the economy. Weather derivatives were introduced in 1997 to help firms manage their weather-related risk exposure. We derive instruments for weather derivative use based on historical (pre-1997) weather exposure. Intuitively, firms whose cash flows have historically fluctuated with changing weather conditions are, relative to other firms, more likely to use weather derivatives once they become available, irrespective of their investment opportunities. Using data from U.S. energy firms, we find that weather derivatives lead to higher market valuations, investments, and leverage. Overall, our results demonstrate that financial innovation can significantly affect firm outcomes and that risk management meaningfully affects valuation, investments, and financing decisions.

Negative Hedging: Performance Sensitive Debt and CEOs' Equity Incentives

We examine the relation between chief executive officers’ equity incentives and their use of performance-sensitive debt contracts. These contracts require higher or lower interest payments when the borrower’s performance deteriorates or improves, thereby increasing expected costs of financial distress while making a firm riskier to the benefit of option holders. We find that managers whose compensation is more sensitive to stock volatility choose steeper and more convex performance pricing schedules, while those with high delta incentives choose flatter, less convex pricing schedules. Performance pricing contracts therefore seem to provide a channel for managers to increase firms’ financial risk to gain private benefits.

Household Production and Asset Prices

We empirically examine the asset pricing implications of the Beckerian framework of household production, where utility is derived from both market consumption and home produced goods. We propose residential electricity usage as a real-time proxy for the service flow from household capital, because electricity is used in most modern-day household production activities and it cannot be easily stored. Using U.S. residential electricity usage from 1955 to 2012, our model based on household production explains the equity premium and the cross section of expected stock returns (including those of industry portfolios) with an R 2 of 71%. This paper was accepted by Jerome Detemple, finance.

Industrial Electricity Usage and Stock Returns

The growth rate of industrial electricity usage predicts future stock returns up to 1 year with an R 2 of 9%. High industrial electricity usage today predicts low stock returns in the future, consistent with a countercyclical risk premium. Industrial electricity usage tracks the output of the most cyclical sectors. Our findings bridge a gap between the asset pricing literature and the business cycle literature, which uses industrial electricity usage to gauge production and output in real time. Industrial electricity growth compares favorably with traditional financial variables, and it outperforms Cooper and Priestley’s output gap measure in real time.

Liquidity Backstop, Corporate Borrowings, and Real Effects

This research investigates the real effects of public liquidity provision. Using the Commercial Paper Funding Facility’s (CPFF) eligibility criteria for non-financial commercial paper issuers as the identification strategy, we show that firms with access to the CPFF were able to mitigate the financing disruptions caused by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the ensuing dysfunctional credit market. CPFF directly reduces risk of eligible firms, which in turn improved their financing and short-term profitability. We find liquidity spillover effects from CPFF-eligible firms to their customers through the increased use of trade credit, which propagates the real effects throughout the economy.

Family Feud: Succession Tournaments and Risk-taking in Family Firms

We study the impact of succession tournaments on risk-taking in family firms. More sons (less daughters) in controlling families are associated with higher income volatility and lower performance – especially, in opaque private firms with pyramidal ownership structure. Contestants exhibit managerial myopia such as higher dividend payouts and less R&D investments. Overall, succession tournaments induce risk-taking and managerial myopia among sons, but positive externalities through marriages (sons-in-law) mitigate these concerns. Using the sudden death of a chairman as an exogenous shock to a succession tournament, we confirm a causal link between increased competition among succession contestants and corporate risk-taking.

Fiscal Policy, Consumption Risk, and Stock Returns: Evidence from U.S. States

We find that consumption risk is lower in states that implement counter-cyclical fiscal policies. Moreover, firms whose investor base are concentrated in counter-cyclical states have lower stock returns, along with firms that relocate their headquarters to a counter-cyclical state. Therefore, counter-cyclical fiscal policies lower the consumption risk of investors and consequently their required equity return premium. This conclusion is confirmed by smaller declines in market participation during recessions in counter-cyclical states. Overall, the location of a firms investor base enables state-level fiscal policy to influence stock returns.

The Full Story of Runs

We examine credit supply during a repo run. Lenders initially relax lending terms upon an initial bad signal about the borrowers creditworthiness. Lenders with a greater exposure to the borrower and a closer lending relationship show a longer period of patience, followed by a less acute credit contraction; so do lenders whose loans are backed by more illiquid assets. The initial credit relaxation is consistent with a lenders incentive to prolong its borrowers life. Other loan terms (price and maturity) remain stable, which suggests active role of collateral in dynamically managing risk exposure relative to price and maturity.