0000000000274117
AUTHOR
Dennis Frestad
WHY MOST FIRMS CHOOSE LINEAR HEDGING STRATEGIES
I investigate the efficiency of alternative hedging strategies of nonfinancial firms facing hedgeable price risk, unhedgeable quantity risk, and financial contracting costs in low-profit events. The analysis suggests that variance-minimizing hedging strategies are very close in economic terms to optimal, value-maximizing hedging strategies for most firms. Furthermore, the marginal gains from shifting to nonlinear hedging strategies are often small enough to be neglected. These results illuminate some puzzling findings in survey studies of firms’ hedging practices and suggest an alternative view on firms’ selective hedging practices termed “cautious selective hedging.”
Modeling Term Structure Dynamics in the Nordic Electricity Swap Market
We analyze the daily returns of Nordic electricity swaps and identify significant risk premia in the short end of the market. On average, long positions in this part of the swap market yield negative returns. The daily returns are distinctively non-normal in terms of tail-fatness, but we find little evidence of asymmetry. We investigate if the flexible four-parameter class of normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) distributions can capture the observed stylized facts and find that this class of distributions offers a remarkably improved fit relative to the normal distribution. We also compare the fit with that of the four-parameter class of stable distributions; the NIG law outperforms the stable la…
Corporate hedging under a resource rent tax regime
Accepted version of an article in the journal: Energy Economics. Published version available on Science Direct: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2009.10.009 In addition to the ordinary corporate income tax, special purpose taxes are sometimes levied to extract abnormal profits arising from the use of natural resources. Such dual tax regimes exist in Norway for oil and hydropower, where the corresponding special purpose tax bases are unaffected by any derivatives payments. Dual tax firms with hedging programs therefore face the risk of potentially large discrepancies between the tax bases for corporate income tax and special purpose tax. I investigate how this tax base asymmetry influences …
How fair-value accounting can influence firm hedging
Published version of an article in the journal: Review of Derivatives Research. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11147-012-9084-y The potential influence of accounting regulations on hedging strategies and the use of financial derivatives is a research topic that has attracted little attention in both the finance and the accounting literature. However, recent surveys suggest that company hedging can be substantially influenced by the accounting for financial instruments. In this study, we illustrate not only why but also how the accounting regulations may affect hedging behavior. We find that under mark-to-market accounting, most firms concerned with earnings…
Liquidity and dirty hedging in the Nordic electricity market
Abstract Hedging involves tradeoffs in incomplete markets because the number of hedging instruments is limited. Even when an extensive set of hedging instruments is available, the ease with which these instruments can be traded may be highly variable. This study finds systematic variations in liquidity in different segments of the Nordic electricity swap market and analyzes the potential for replacing low-liquidity, delivery-period-matched hedging instruments with more liquid, delivery-period-mismatched hedging instruments. When the costs of implementing such dirty hedging strategies are lower than those of the replaced hedging instruments and the loss of hedge effectiveness is small, dirty…
Convex costs and the hedging paradox
Accepted version of an article from the journal:Journal of Corporate Finance. Published version available on Science Direct: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2009.10.002 Financial theory suggests that hedging can increase shareholder value in the presence of capital market imperfections, including direct and indirect costs of financial distress, costly external financing, and convex tax exposure. The influence of these costs, which are high when profits are low and low or negligible when profits are large, on the extent of firm hedging has not been consistently addressed in the finance literature. In Brown and Toft's (2002) model, more convex costs imply that a firm will decrease the ex…
CORRELATIONS AMONG FORWARD RETURNS IN THE NORDIC ELECTRICITY MARKET
I analyze empirical correlations of electricity forward returns from the perspective of a random field model that specifies the correlations in terms of the temporal separation between forward maturities. It turns out that temporal separation cannot fully account for the empirical forward return correlations. Specifically, the relation between correlations and temporal separation does not seem to be invariant across segments of the electricity forward market or trading periods.
Hedge Effectiveness Testing as a Screening Mechanism for Hedge Accounting
Accounting for financial instruments has been subject to much controversy, particularly accounting practices related to derivatives held for hedging purposes. For cash flow hedges, poor matching may result when fair-value accounting is prescribed for the hedging instrument and historical cost is prescribed for the assets that generate the “highly probable forecast transaction” to be hedged. Fair-value accounting may therefore induce excess variations in earnings, which could make a firm appear to be more risky than it actually is. The alternative to fair-value accounting offered by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to fi…