Is Operating Flexibility Harmful Under Debt?
研究了债务下企业运营灵活性（如补货或清算库存）导致的效率损失，发现风险转移激励会使借贷成本抹去超三分之一的企业价值，并检验了财务契约和借款基础契约在恢复价值中的作用。
We study the inefficiencies stemming from a firm’s operating flexibility under debt. We find that flexibility in replenishing or liquidating inventory, by providing risk-shifting incentives, could lead to borrowing costs that erase more than one-third of the firm’s value. In this context, we examine the effectiveness of practical and widely used covenants in restoring firm value by limiting such risk-shifting behavior. We find that simple financial covenants can fully restore value for a firm that possesses a midseason inventory liquidation option. In the presence of added flexibility in replenishing or partially liquidating inventory, financial covenants fail, but simple borrowing base covenants successfully restore firm value. Explicitly characterizing optimal covenant tightness for all these cases, we find that better market conditions, such as lower inventory depreciation rate, higher gross margins, or increased product demand, are typically associated with tighter covenants. Our results suggest that inventory-heavy firms can reap the full benefits of additional operating flexibility, irrespective of their leverage, by entering simple debt contracts of the type commonly employed in practice. For such contracts to be effective, however, firms with enhanced flexibility and/or operating in better markets must also be willing to abide by more and/or tighter covenants. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.