Empirical evidence of risk shifting in bonds and debt-based sukuk: the case of Malaysian corporations

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of risk shifting behavior in bonds and sukuk. The examination is significant, as economists and scholars identify risk shifting as the primary cause of the global financial crisis. Yet, the dangers of this debt-financing feature are largely ignored – one needs to only witness the record growth of global debt even after the global financial crisis. To identify the signs of risk shifting existence in the corporations, this paper compares each corporation’s operating risk before and after issuing debt. Operating risk or risk of a firm’s activities is measured using the volatility of the operating earnings or coefficient variation of earning before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). Using EBITDA as the variable offers one distinct advantage to using asset volatility as previous research has – EBITDA can be extracted directly from firms’ accounting data and is not model-specific.