Thouraya Triki

Abstract

The new NYSE rules for corporate governance require the audit committee to discuss and review the firm's risk assessment and hedging strategies. They also put additional requirements for the composition and the financial knowledge of the directors sitting on the board and on the audit committee. In this paper, we investigate whether these new rules as well as those set by the Sarbanes Oxley act lead to hedging decisions that are of more benefit to shareholders. We construct a novel hand collected dataset that allows us to explore multiple definitions for the financially knowledgeable term present in this new regulation. We find that the requirements on the audit committee size and independence are beneficial to shareholders, although maintaining a majority of unrelated directors in the board and a director with an accounting background on the audit committee may not be necessary. Interestingly, financially educated directors seem to encourage corporate hedging while financially active directors and those with an accounting background play no active role in such policy. This evidence combined with the positive relation we report between hedging and the firm's performance suggests that shareholders are better off with financially educated directors on their boards and audit committees. Our empirical findings also show that having directors with a university education on the board is an important determinant of the hedging level. Indeed, our measure of risk management is found to be an increasing function of the percentage of directors holding a diploma superior to a bachelor degree. This result is the first direct evidence concerning the importance of university education for the board of directors. Download Info To download: If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large. File URL:http://132.203.59.36/CIRPEE/cahierscirpee/2005/files/CIRPEE05-15.pdf

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Date of creation: 2005

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More information through EDIRC For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: johanne.perron@ecn.ulaval.ca (Johanne Perron). Related research Keywords: Corporate governance risk management corporate hedging financial knowledge board independence audit committee independence board of directors university education empirical test unrelated directors NYSE rules Sarbanes Oxley act audit committee size financially educated directors financially active directors firm performance Find related papers by JEL classification:

G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation

G30 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - General

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: * NEP-ACC-2005-06-14 (Accounting & Auditing) * NEP-ALL-2005-06-14 (All new papers) * NEP-FIN-2005-06-14 (Finance) * NEP-FMK-2005-06-14 (Financial Markets) * NEP-RMG-2005-06-14 (Risk Management) References listed on IDEAS

Please report citation or reference errors to Jose.Barrueco@uv.es, or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: # Froot, Kenneth A & Scharfstein, David S & Stein, Jeremy C, 1993. " Risk Management: Coordinating Corporate Investment and Financing Policies," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(5), pages 1629-58, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)

Other versions: #* Kenneth A. Froot & David S. Scharfstein & Jeremy C. Stein, 1992. "Risk Management: Coordinating Corporate Investment and Financing Policies," NBER Working Papers 4084, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # John R. Graham & Clifford W. Smith, 1999. "Tax Incentives to Hedge," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(6), pages 2241-2262, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # DeMarzo, Peter M. & Duffie, Darrell, 1991. "Corporate financial hedging with proprietary information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 53(2), pages 261-286, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Weisbach, Michael S., 1988. "Outside directors and CEO turnover," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1-2), pages 431-460, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Fama, Eugene F & Jensen, Michael C, 1983. "Separation of Ownership and Control," Journal of Law & Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(2), pages 301-25, June. # John R. Graham & Daniel A. Rogers, 2002. "Do Firms Hedge in Response to Tax Incentives?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(2), pages 815-839, 04. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Klein, April, 1998. "Firm Performance and Board Committee Structure," Journal of Law & Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 41(1), pages 275-303, April. # Xie, Biao & Davidson, Wallace III & DaDalt, Peter J., 2003. "Earnings management and corporate governance: the role of the board and the audit committee," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 295-316, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Banz, Rolf W., 1981. "The relationship between return and market value of common stocks," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 3-18, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # John, Kose & Senbet, Lemma W., 1998. "Corporate governance and board effectiveness1," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 371-403, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Fama, Eugene F, 1980. "Agency Problems and the Theory of the Firm," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 88(2), pages 288-307, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Allayannis, George & Weston, James P, 2001. "The Use of Foreign Currency Derivatives and Firm Market Value," Review of Financial Studies, Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(1), pages 243-76. # Davidson, Wallace III & Xie, Biao & Xu, Weihong, 2004. "Market reaction to voluntary announcements of audit committee appointments: The effect of financial expertise," Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 279-293. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Benjamin E. Hermalin & Michael S. Weisbach, 1991. "The Effects of Board Composition and Direct Incentives on Firm Performance," Financial Management, Financial Management Association, vol. 20(4), Winter.

Other versions: #* Hermalin, B.E. & Weisbech, M.S., 1991. "The Effects of Board Composition and Direct Incentives on Firm Performance," Papers 91-02, Rochester, Business - Financial Research and Policy Studies. # William Greene, 2004. "The behaviour of the maximum likelihood estimator of limited dependent variable models in the presence of fixed effects," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 7(1), pages 98-119, 06. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Stulz, ReneM., 1990. "Managerial discretion and optimal financing policies," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 3-27, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # DeMarzo, Peter M & Duffie, Darrell, 1995. "Corporate Incentives for Hedging and Hedge Accounting," Review of Financial Studies, Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 8(3), pages 743-71. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Brickley, James A. & Coles, Jeffrey L. & Terry, Rory L., 1994. "Outside directors and the adoption of poison pills," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 371-390, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Cotter, James F. & Shivdasani, Anil & Zenner, Marc, 1997. "Do independent directors enhance target shareholder wealth during tender offers?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 195-218, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Georges Dionne & Thouraya Triki, 2004. "On Risk Management Determinants: What Really Matters?," Cahiers de recherche 0417, CIRPEE. [Downloadable!] # Yanbo Jin & Philippe Jorion, 2006. "Firm Value and Hedging: Evidence from U.S. Oil and Gas Producers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(2), pages 893-919, 04. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Lee, Yung Sheng & Rosenstein, Stuart & Wyatt, Jeffrey G., 1999. "The value of financial outside directors on corporate boards," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 421-431, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Agrawal, Anup & Chadha, Sahiba, 2005. "Corporate Governance and Accounting Scandals," Journal of Law & Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(2), pages 371-406, October. # Booth, James R. & Deli, Daniel N., 1999. "On executives of financial institutions as outside directors," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 227-250, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted) # Mitchell A. Petersen & S. Ramu Thiagarajan, 2000. "Risk Measurement and Hedging: With and Without Derivatives," Financial Management, Financial Management Association, vol. 29(4), Winter. # Whidbee, David A. & Wohar, Mark, 1999. "Derivative activities and managerial incentives in the banking industry," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 251-276, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted) Full references Cited by:

(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to Jose.Barrueco@uv.es, or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) # J. David Cummins & Georges Dionne & Robert Gagné & Abdelhakim Nouira, 2006. "Efficiency of Insurance Firms with Endogenous Risk Management and Financial Intermediation Activities," Cahiers de recherche 0616, CIRPEE. [Downloadable!] # J. David Cummins & Georges Dionne & Robert Gagné & Abdelhakim Nouira, 2006. "Efficiency of Insurance Firms with Endogenous Risk Management and Financial Intermediation Activities," Cahiers de recherche 06-06, HEC Montréal, Institut d'économie appliquée. [Downloadable!] # Chang Dan & Hong Gu & Kuan Xu, 2005. "The Impact of Hedging on Stock Return and Firm Value: New Evidence from Canadian Oil and Gas Companies," Department of Economics at Dalhousie University working papers archive hedging, Dalhousie, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!] Statistics Access and download statistics Did you know? The most prolific authors have over 400 items listed on IDEAS. This page was last updated on 2008-10-29. ----

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