Financial Flexibility, Risk Management, and Payout Choice
研究发现，企业通过回购而非分红来增加支付灵活性，可以替代金融对冲，从而降低财务困境和投资不足的风险。
Both risk management and payout decisions affect a firm's financial flexibility—the ability to avoid costly financial distress as well as underinvestment. We provide evidence of substitution between hedging and payout decisions using samples of both financial and nonfinancial firms. We find that a more flexible distribution, favoring repurchases over dividends, is negatively related to financial hedging within a firm, consistent with financial flexibility in payout decisions and hedging being substitutes. Our findings, which are robust to controlling for the endogeneity of hedging and payout choices, suggest that payout flexibility offers operational hedging benefits.