详情
Project Risk Choices under Privately Insured Financing*
The seminal works of Jensen and Meckling (1976) and Myers (1977) highlight the conflicts of interest between the owners, managers, and debt holders of the firm and discuss the risk-shifting behavior of the managers assumed for our purpose to be the“firm” in detriment of their debt holders. Although a considerable amount of research has been undertaken on this topic, much less studies are devoted to endogenizing risk choices in the presence of financial guarantees and in the context of corporate project financing. A firm risk’s appetite increases when it has a guarantee contract on its debt, which creates a conflict between the firm and the guarantee provider. Addressing formally this moral hazard issue, we propose an equilibrium model in which the borrowing firm and the guarantee provider pre-commit themselves to conscripted risk levels at the signature of the loan guarantee contract. We show if the borrowing firm and the guarantor precommit, the equilibrium risk level is lower than the one the firm will choose unilaterally. For short (long) maturity debts, both parties gain by agreeing on a high (low) risk project when the firm shareholders have a big equity stake in the new project. We also study the trade-off between the borrowing firm’s capital structure and its risk level. The optimal risk level of the firm is entirely determined by its ex-post capital structure.
