also reduces the costs of agency conflicts between managers and shareholders, then it may actually increase the equity value of the firm by aligning managers' incentives with the preferences of other stakeholders.
There can be a downside to allowing managers to hedge. Capital markets value the expected returns and risks of the firm's investment and financing choices and pronounce a verdict in the form of a share price. New external financing imposes financial discipline on managers by forcing them to raise new money at market prices. Managers have an incentive to hedge if, by reducing cash flow variability, they can finance projects internally and avoid the discipline of external financial markets. To the extent that managers use hedging to reduce their need for new external financial, this may decrease shareholder wealth.
Stock options further complicate the issue, because managers that own options on their own company's stock have little incentive to hedge. Indeed. Stock options may encourage managers to actively pursue riskier investment in order to maximize the value of their options. However, stock options are only one part of a compensation contract and may be more or less important than other elements of the contract such as salary or job security.
It is not surprising that there is little empirical evidence regarding how the shareholder-manager relationship affect manager' incentives to hedge. Certainly intuition and a great deal of scholarship suggest that the principal-agent relationship is important in determining managers' risk management behaviors. Yet, which effect dominates in any particular situation is likely to be situation-dependent, and this makes it difficult to make unequivocal statements about the impact of agency costs on managers' hedging incentives.