Endogenizing Leverage D

Now we endogenize the target date-0 debt value . A tradeoff between saving taxes versus increasing bankruptcy costs will yield a positive value of , for standard reasons. There is not much special about this approach in our framework. An alternative is to account for the control role of debt, and of short-term debt in particular. This section describes such an approach. This added structure will prove to be useful in extending our results below.

0

D 0

D

Suppose that at t=0 the entrepreneur owns the patent of the project. To start this project, the entrepreneur with no personal wealth needs 1 dollar of initial investment. He can raise this initial investment through debt or (outside) equity, and becomes the manager of the firm afterwards. We assume that equity holders are soft claims that are subject to renegotiation.

      

maintenance incentive in the up state with slack refinancing constraint. With a more general structure, we can have market-based-pricing to alleviate overhang effect on default decision directly, and then feeds back to the firm’s maintenance incentives. Suppose that we have a medium state at t=1 state B. Then we can easily construct an example where maintenance, through affecting the refinancing cost at the medium state, helps the firm stay above the overhang/default region, which further raises the maintenance incentives.

We will use a very simple model motivated by Jensen (1986), Hart and Moore (1994), Diamond and Rajan (1999), and Diamond (2004, 2006). It introduces managerial “equity overhang,” where managers take a fraction λof all free cash flow in excess of debt payments. We follow Diamond (2004, 2006) and assume that default on debt allows the legal system to prevent the manager from consuming any cash they divert instead of paying out or investing (giving the manager nothing if the legal sanction is imposed).20 Legal sanctions remove any of the benefit of diversion which occurs that period, but not the benefit of diversion in previous periods. Contracts are written such that this legal sanction is imposed if a debt contract is not paid on its due date. The threat of this legal sanction ensures that debt is paid when cash is available, and because debt cannot be renegotiated, the default automatically imposes the sanction. However equity contracts (which are soft) do not have automatic sanctions so that equity holders have no right to impose the legal sanction for default. We simply assume that the manager can take a fractionλof remaining cash flows, which can be motivated byλ being the relative bargaining power of the manager in dealing with equity holders. Equivalently, we can assume that the manager is able to directly divert all free cash and retain a fraction λ _{of it (while} destroying a fraction 1-λ) in a way that cannot be verified or recovered without legal sanctions. As a result, owners of outside equity allow the manager to take a fraction λ _{of current free cash} flow each period, if the manager so desires, given its effect on his current or future payoffs.

To recap, at t=0 the firm raises equity and debt to carry out the investment.21 At t=1 the refinancing decision is controlled by the existing shareholders. Because issuing any new equity only benefits the entrepreneur and dilutes their own value, the new financing is in the form of (junior) debt. And t=2 the manager can get (at least)λ fraction of free cash flows after the debt payment.

Denote by the value of entrepreneur/manager, the value of (outside) equity, and

the value of long-term and short-term debt. The agency problem at t=2 implies that _{0 0}

0 M E₀ D₀ 1 M λ E λ − , ≥        20

This model is a much simplified of that in Diamond (2006). We simplify by assuming that no debt can be renegotiated and that the legal sanctions of debt default completely eliminate proceeds from managerial diversion on the date when default occurs.

21

We assume that the manager can commit to invest funds properly on the instant they are received, but cannot commit not to divert cash flows obtained in excess of immediate investment needs or cash flows obtained from the returns to investments.

i.e., the manager has to have sufficient inside stake for him to behave. The initial investment requires that ; if this inequality holds strictly then the entrepreneur/manager can consume the difference at date-0. Therefore the entrepreneur’s date-0 value is

0 0 1 E +D ≥

(

)

0+ 0 0 1 M E +D −

( )

0 v D .

Finally, denote by the date-0 firm value as a function of date-0 debt value, where the firm value is determined by the optimal maturity structure derived in Proposition 1. Because the only agency issue that hurts the firm value is debt overhang, it is easy to see that is decreasing

in . Finally, the accounting identity implies that

( )

0

v D

0

D E0+M0+D0 =v D

( )

0 . Therefore the manager

who chooses the date-0 financial structure solves the following problem:

(

)

( )

0 0 0 0 0 0 0, 0 0 0 0 max s.t. + 1 1, 1 M E D E D M

λ

v

λ

+ − + ≥ ≥ − E E +M +D = D

Proposition 4. Assume that

(

1−λ

) ( )

v 0 <1 andv

( )

1 > . Then the optimal date-0 debt value 1

is the smallest solution to the equation

(

0,1

D*

)

0∈ D0+ −

(

1 λ

) ( )(

v D0 −D0

)

= . 1

The first restriction

(

)

implies that using outside equity only cannot raise enough capital to cover initial investment; and the second condition

( )

1−λ v 0 <1

( )

1 1

v > implies that it is feasible to

raise the entire investment capital by debt. Then the optimal date-0 debt will be an interior solution. Finally, the equation in Proposition 4 simply says that the debt holders and outside equity holders (who have a 1− fraction of total equity valueλ v D

( )

₀ −D₀) contribute the entire initial investment 1 (as the manager has zero initial wealth.)

In document A Theory of Debt Maturity: The Long and Short of Debt Overhang (Page 31-33)