Risk Management: Disclosure Effects

Abstract

This thesis explores the effect of disclosure on risk management policies. Following recent theory on risk management, with market imperfections, risk management creates value by reducing the volatility of the cash flows. Those risk policies are conditioned by actual disclosure rules that reduce information asymmetry between managers and shareholders, providing a comprehensive view of the firm. However, disclosure gives different accounting choices, hence affecting the decision‐making process of managers. The purpose of this thesis is to establish if managers adapt their actual risk policy to disclosure rules. Specifically, we discuss how managers make decisions regarding exchange rate risk in forecasted transactions. In addition, we discuss how hedging affects valuation by using an investor perspective. This is done through the analysis of the automotive industry in Sweden, Germany and France and the considerations of analysts and auditors. We found that risk management policies are affected by accounting rules and that analysts are aware of those effects but have problems to measure them. However, not enough evidence was found to prove that managers try to avoid the volatility the fair value option brings when hedging a forecasted flow.