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Review of Accounting Studies

01.09.2012

Hedge commitments and agency costs of debt: evidence from interest rate protection covenants and accounting conservatism

Erschienen in: Review of Accounting Studies | Ausgabe 3/2012

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Abstract

We provide large sample evidence that credible hedge commitments reduce the agency costs of debt and that accounting conservatism enhances hedge commitments. We examine 2,338 bank loans entered into by 263 mandatory derivative users that are contractually obligated by interest rate protection covenants, 709 voluntary derivative users, and 1,366 non-users. We show that loan contracts are more likely to include interest rate protection covenants when borrowers are less likely to maintain the hedge position once the financing is completed. We find that borrowers who credibly commit to hedge using these covenants significantly reduce their interest rates. While we do not find an average interest savings for voluntary derivative users, we do find a reduction in their loan rates when they practice conservative financial reporting. Our results suggest that accounting conservatism helps borrowers resolve shareholder-creditor conflicts by committing to maintain their hedge positions after completing debt financing.

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Since virtually all syndicated loans charge variable-rates, banks are more concerned about borrowers’ ability to fulfill interests payment obligations when interest rates increase.

They assume that information asymmetry prevents equity investors from completely adjusting the reporting bias resulting from accounting conservatism. Therefore, when accounting is conservative, low accounting earnings does not necessarily imply low true economic earnings, thereby reducing the benefits of upward earnings management.

An exception is Gezcy et al. (1997), who recognize that lenders may require borrowers to follow certain hedging strategies. They note that at least four of their sample firms have interest rate hedge covenants. However, they do not specifically investigate these mandatory derivative users.

Section 106 of the Bank Holding Company Act Amendments of 1970 prohibits banks from conditioning the availability or terms of loans on the purchase of certain other products and services.

We thank Chris Hunt, Principal at Cardea Partners (http://www.cardeapartners.com/) for providing the institutional knowledge about deal arrangements and information about the hedge accounting treatment for derivative contracts that are entered to fulfill interest rate protection covenant requirements.

The fact that interest rate protection covenants may require hedging for only part of the relevant debt outstanding for a period less than the maturity does not imply that the hedge is ineffective. In a discussion of cash flow hedges, FAS 133 paragraph 28 states: “An entity may designate a derivative instrument as hedging the exposure to variability in expected future cash flows that is attributable to a particular risk. That exposure may be associated with an existing recognized asset or liability (such as all or certain future interest payments on variable-rate debt) or a forecasted transaction (such as a forecasted purchase or sale).” FAS 133 paragraph 98 and 99 example 8 further demonstrates this point. Chris Hunt of Cardea Partners also verified this accounting treatment.

In an interest-decreasing environment, borrowers may want to unwind the pay-fixed receive-floating hedge position and recognize a loss in order to smooth their earnings.

Biddle et al. (2011) document that accounting conservatism reduces the downside risk of operating cash flows through increased cash holdings, reduced customer bargaining power, and increased hedge usage. We differ from Biddle et al. (2011) by separately analyzing mandatory users and voluntary users and by examining how accounting conservatism serves as a commitment mechanism.

We can clearly identify voluntary users when firms explicitly disclose the purpose of the new derivative contracts in their 10-K filings. When firms do not disclose the purpose of their derivative contracts, we examine the change in the notional amount of the variable-to-fixed derivative instruments (swaps, caps, and collars) between the fiscal year of loan origination and the fiscal year prior to loan origination. If the change in the notional amount is positive, we consider the loan to have been (at least partially) swapped to fixed-rate.

An alternative modeling choice is to separately compare non-users with voluntary users, non-users with mandatory users, and voluntary users with mandatory users. However, comparing only two groups at a time ignores the information contained in the third group, thereby reducing the power of the empirical tests. We conduct robustness checks using this alternative design in subsection 5.4, where we discuss any difference in the results.

The principal components analysis shows that only the first eigenvalue is significantly greater than 1. Therefore, one factor captures much of the common variations among the three conservatism measures.

Consistent with previous research, such as Vasvari (2006) and Zhang (2008), we treat these other loan characteristics as exogenous in our models. While we appreciate that all of these characteristics might be endogenously determined, we believe that their choice is not a first order concern in addressing our focal issue of hedge commitment. The large dimensionality of the loan characteristics that we control for makes it undesirable to model all of these characteristics as endogenous choices. For example, if we want to simultaneously model the inclusion of 4 different covenants (sample mean of NCOV is 4) and the security requirement, we need to estimate a system that requires numerical integration over a 5 dimensional normal density to obtain the maximum likelihood. This is a numerically infeasible task. In fact, Freedman (2009) states that “finding maxima in high-dimensional spaces is something of a black art; and the higher the dimensionality, the blacker the art.”

In our sample, 55 % of the deals contain only one facility. Our results are robust to alternative specifications such as using only the facility with the largest borrowing amount or using a weighted average of all facilities in the deal where the weights equal the borrowing amounts. See subsection 5.4 Sensitivity Tests for more discussions.

Faulkender (2005) also finds no association between derivative use and the firm’s natural hedge positions.

Ai and Norton (2003) argue that it can be difficult to interpret an interaction term in non-linear models if the objective is to assess the marginal effect of an independent variable at a point other than the center of the distribution. Since the purpose of the interaction terms in our bivariate Probit model is to examine whether the impact of the natural hedge position on derivative use varies with conservatism, rather than the absolute marginal effect of conservatism, we can rely on the interaction terms to draw inferences (Kolasinski and Siegel 2010).

Zhang (2008) finds a negative association between loan spreads and accounting conservatism only for a sub-sample of loans without performance pricing in her main test. Similarly, Vasvari (2006) documents a negative association between loan spreads and accounting only when managers have below average equity compensation.

Except that when conservatism is measured by Khan and Watts (2009) (i.e., column (3)) the sum of the coefficients on CONSERV and \( {\text{USE}}\widehat{*}{\text{CONSERV}} \) is insignificant (p value = 0.39).

This conclusion applies to conservatism measures CONSERV and CONSERV_SK (columns (2) and (4)). When conservatism is measured as CONSERV_KW (column (3)) and CONSERV_AC (column (5)), the sum of the coefficients on CONSERV, \( {\text{USE}}\widehat{*}{\text{CONSERV}} \), and \( {\text{MAND}}\widehat{*}{\text{CONSERV}} \) is significant at 5 % level.

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Titel: Hedge commitments and agency costs of debt: evidence from interest rate protection covenants and accounting conservatism
Publikationsdatum: 01.09.2012
Erschienen in: Review of Accounting Studies / Ausgabe 3/2012
Print ISSN: 1380-6653
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7136
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-012-9189-4