Product Price Risk and Liquidity Management: Evidence from the Electricity Industry
Charles A. Dice Center Working Paper No. 2017-12
48 Pages Posted: 16 May 2017 Last revised: 16 Jul 2019
There are 2 versions of this paper
Product Price Risk and Liquidity Management: Evidence from the Electricity Industry
Price Risk, Production Flexibility, and Liquidity Management: Evidence from Electricity Generating Firms
Date Written: July 5, 2019
Abstract
Product price risk is a potentially important factor for firms’ liquidity management. A natural place to evaluate the impact of this risk on liquidity management is the electricity industry, since producing firms face substantial price volatility in wholesale markets. Empirically, higher volatility of electricity prices leads to an increase in cash holdings, and this effect is robust to instrumenting for price risk using weather volatility. Cash increases more with price risk in firms using inflexible production technologies and those that cannot easily hedge electricity prices, indicating that operating flexibility and hedging are substitutes for liquidity management.
Keywords: Electricity price volatility, cash holdings, weather volatility, operating flexibility, hedging
JEL Classification: G30, G32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation