Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck, language: English, abstract: This seminar paper deals with three main hedging policies. It is based on the Smith and Stulz (1985) paper "e;the determinants of firms' hedging policies. Furthermore their results are compared with other scientific papers. At the end, one should be able to get a basic knowledge about hedging and how taxes, debt and managerial behavior can influence different policies.