Ordinarily, only the interests of shareholders, debtholders, and corporate management are taken into account when analyzing corporate financial decisions while the interests of non-financial stakeholders are often neglected.

Gregor Gossy develops a so-called stakeholder rationale for risk management arguing that firms which are more dependent on implicit claims from their non-financial stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, and employees, prefer conservative financial policies. In order to perform panel data analyses of the determinants of corporate financial decisions, the author uses data from Austrian and German industrial companies. He shows that variables for a firm's most important non-financial stakeholders explain the firm's capital structure and cash holding decisions. His findings suggest that a firm's choice of accounting standards have a moderating effect on the determinants of corporate finance decisions.

Autorentext
Dr. Gregor Gossy promovierte bei Univ.-Prof. Dr. Paul Wentges am Institut für Unternehmensführung der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. Er ist derzeit als Unternehmensberater bei The Boston Consulting Group tätig.

Zusammenfassung
Ordinarily, only the interests of shareholders, debtholders and corporate management are taken into account when analyzing corporate financial decisions, while the interests of the other non-financial stakeholders are neglected. In his study, Gregor Gossy investigates the interesting but under-researched implications of the firm's relationships with its non-financial stakeholders such as customers, employees and suppliers on corporate financial decisions. In particular, he develops a so-called stakeholder rationale for risk management and discusses whether this risk management approach contributes to a better understanding of the motives for and consequences of conservative corporate financial decisions in the areas of capital structure choice, corporate cash holdings and payout policy. The underlying theory of the firm has a huge impact on corporate finance theory. In the first part of this book, therefore, Gregor Gossy discusses the relevant developments of the new institutional economics and combines them nicely with results of the resource-based view of the firm to get a well-founded stakeholder-oriented theory of the firm. On this basis, he develops his main hypothesis that the degree of conservativeness of a firm's financial policies is positively associated with the extent to which the firm is dependent on value enhancing specific investments of its stakeholders. In the second part of this study, he empirically tests his hypotheses for corporate cash holdings and capital structure decisions on a sample of 593 Austrian and German listed corporations.

Inhalt
Stakeholder Theory.- The Theory of the Firm.- The Theory of Corporate Risk Management.- Theories of Corporate Finance Decisions.- Statistical methodology.- Empirical study.- Conclusions and suggestions for future research.