Currency Risk Management in Us Multinational Corporations: Firm Value and Agency Related Costs

In recent years a growing number of corporations have committed considerable resources to risk management, indicating the potential for risk management to protect and increase firm value. One can argue that most prior attempts to directly link the value of the firm to its hedging strategies are rather scant. Moreover, several questions with regards to firms? risk management activities remain unanswered. This book deals with a series of questions regarding corporate risk management in modern U. S. multinational corporations. In the first part we, test the valuation effects of currency hedging policies of firms around extraordinary exchange rate instability events, which provide us with a unique set of exogenous events to assess the effectiveness of currency risk management on firm value. In the second part we investigate the relationship between currency risk management activities, firm value and the agency-related costs arising from the separation of ownership and control. The Corporate Governance Index (G); a state of the art measure, to proxy for the level of agency costs is used in our analysis.