IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/revfin/v23y2019i6p1115-1154..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

In the Path of the Storm: Does Distress Risk Cause Industrial Firms to Risk-Shift?

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin Aretz
  • Shantanu Banerjee
  • Oksana Pryshchepa

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin Aretz & Shantanu Banerjee & Oksana Pryshchepa, 2019. "In the Path of the Storm: Does Distress Risk Cause Industrial Firms to Risk-Shift?," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 23(6), pages 1115-1154.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:revfin:v:23:y:2019:i:6:p:1115-1154.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rof/rfy028
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peydró, José-Luis & Polo, Andrea & Sette, Enrico, 2020. "Risk Mitigating versus Risk Shifting: Evidence from Banks Security Trading in Crises," CEPR Discussion Papers 15473, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Zhao, Rui & Zhang, Dayong & Guo, Mengmeng, 2024. "Do natural disasters affect stock price crash risk? Evidence from emerging markets," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    3. Zhiyao Chen & Ran Duchin, 2024. "Do Nonfinancial Firms Use Financial Assets to Take Risk?," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 13(1), pages 1-37.
    4. (DJ) Fairhurst, Douglas & Liu, Yanguang & Ni, Xiaoran, 2020. "Employment protection and tax aggressiveness: Evidence from wrongful discharge laws," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    5. Feng, Zhi-Yuan & Wang, Chou-Wen & Lu, Yu-Hong, 2022. "The impact of climatic disaster on corporate investment policy," Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    6. Bai, Min & Zhang, Yuqi & Yu, Chia-Feng (Jeffrey), 2024. "Do firms gamble for resurrection from COVID-19?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 241(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Agency conflicts; Risk-shifting; Distress risk; Segment data; Hurricane strikes;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
    • G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:revfin:v:23:y:2019:i:6:p:1115-1154.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eufaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.