This paper analyzes the relation between agency conflicts and risk management. In contrast to previous contributions, our analysis incorporates not only stockholder-debtholder conflicts but also manager–stockholder conflicts. We show that the costs of both underinvestment and overinvestment are essential in determining the firm's hedging policy. In particular, firms that derive more of their value from assets in place (lower market-to-book ratios), although having lower costs of underinvestment, generally display larger costs of overinvestment. Thus, they may be more likely to hedge to control these overinvestment incentives. Our analysis explains why large profitable firms with fewer growth opportunities tend to hedge more (Bartram et al., 2004). It also provides a number of new predictions relating the benefits associated with risk management to various dimensions of the firm's economic environment.

For corporations facing tax‐function convexity, hedging lowers expected tax liabilities, thereby providing an incentive to hedge. We use simulation methods to investigate convexity induced by tax‐code provisions. On average, the tax function is convex (although in approximately 25 percent of cases it is concave). Carrybacks and carryforwards increase the range of income with incentives to hedge; other tax‐code provisions have minor impacts. Among firms facing convex tax functions, average tax savings from a five percent reduction in the volatility of taxable income are about 5.4 percent of expected tax liabilities; in extreme cases, these savings exceed 40 percent.

The authors provide an empirical examination of the determinants of corporate debt maturity. Their evidence offers strong support for the contracting-cost hypothesis. Firms that have few growth options, are large, or are regulated have more long-term debt in their capital structure. The authors find little evidence that firms use the maturity structure of their debt to signal information to the market. The evidence is consistent, however, with the hypothesis that firms with larger information asymmetries issue more short-term debt. The authors find no evidence that taxes affect debt maturity.

We assume executives managing corporate financial policy consider the firm's current and target leverage, investment plans, anticipated cash flows, and consequences of alternative sequences of financing transactions, operating within efficient markets. Our analysis yields time-series and cross-sectional predictions for management of investment spending and leverage; use of maturity, priority, and convertibility covenants; and management of dividends, share repurchases, cash balances, and credit lines. Our evidence from 8608 SEOs covering 1970–2015 is consistent with implications of our theory, helps to resolve an array of issues in corporate finance, and offers a step toward a more unified analysis of rational corporate financial management.

This paper examines change in property-liability insurers' risk-taking around enactments of state guaranty fund laws. Our evidence suggests that the risk of insurers' asset portfolios increases following enactments. But this increase in risk is significant only for stock insurers. Our evidence of increased risk-taking following guaranty-fund adoptions suggests that the way these funds are organized creates counterproductive investment incentives, especially for stock companies. Because these laws were enacted by states over the period 1969–1981, our evidence on changes in risk-taking helps resolve statistical problems that have been troublesome for studies of bank deposit insurance.