This paper provides a theoretical explanation for how risk preferences of a firm’s manager impact a firm’s optimal financing policy and shareholder value. The developed model implies that firms in growing industries are more valuable if they are run by more risk-seeking managers. Similarly, firms operating in declining industries should be run by less risk-seeking managers. Given that a firm’s optimal assets do not depend on the growth opportunities, and that debt is the difference between assets and equity, the model implies that there is a negative (positive) correlation between the riskiness of CEOs’ compensation packages and firms’ financial leverage ratios for firms in growing (declining) industries. This prediction is in stark contrast to economic intuition and prior literature in that less risk aversion normally should increase risk-taking. The empirical analysis generally supports all the model’s implications except those related to firms operating in declining industries.

We find that the magnitude of unique credit default swap (CDS) market information (constructed to be orthogonal to contemporaneous and lagged stock returns) declined after recent reforms that increased the level of post-trade regulatory and market transparency for CDSs. Around the same reforms, the ability of this CDS-unique information to predict future stock returns decreased. These results suggest the CDS market has become less of a “hidden” trading venue for informed investors since central clearing and trade reporting started.