The Impact of Leverage on Investment Expenditures Revisited: New Insights from Analyzing Private Firms

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Huyghebaert ◽  
Tom Franck
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Youliang Yan ◽  
Xixiong Xu

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how affiliation with the government-controlled business association, namely, China Federation of Industry and Commerce (CFIC), affects corporate philanthropy in an emerging market. Design/methodology/approach Through an analysis of survey data gathered from Chinese private firms, this paper conducts multiple regressions to examine the impact of the CFIC membership on corporate philanthropy. Findings Empirical results show that the CFIC membership of private entrepreneurs is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropy. Moreover, this study finds that the provincial marketization level and the firm Communist Party branch attenuate the positive association between CFIC membership and corporate philanthropy, indicating that the effect of CFIC on corporate philanthropy is more pronounced in regions with lower marketization level and firms without Communist Party branch. The findings are robust to various alternate measures of corporate philanthropy and remain valid after controlling for potential endogeneity. Practical implications Firms will be more active in corporate philanthropy to respond to the government’s governance appeal when they join the CFIC. This highlights the implications of political connections and in particular on the value of government-controlled business associations in the Chinese business world. Originality/value This study extends the literature on the determinants of corporate philanthropy and deepens the theoretical understanding of the governance role of business association with Chinese characteristics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajay Agrawal ◽  
Carlos Rosell ◽  
Timothy Simcoe

In 2004, Canada changed the eligibility rules for its Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit, which provides tax incentives for R&D conducted by small private firms. Difference-in-difference estimates show a 17 percent increase in total R&D among eligible firms. The impact was larger for firms that took the tax credits as refunds because they had no current tax liability. Contract R&D expenditures were more elastic than the R&D wage bill. The response was also greater for firms that invested in R&D capital before the policy change. (JEL D22, G32, H25, L25, O32, O38)


Author(s):  
Zhiyuan Chen ◽  
Xin Jin ◽  
Xu Xu

Abstract We study the impact of anticorruption efforts on firm performance, exploiting an unanticipated corruption crackdown in China’s Heilongjiang province in 2004. We compare firms in the affected regions with those in other inland regions before and after the crackdown. Our main finding is an overall negative impact of the crackdown on firm productivity and entry rates. Furthermore, these negative impacts are mainly experienced by private and foreign firms, while state-owned firms are mostly unaffected. We present evidence concerning two potential explanations for our findings. First, the corruption crackdown may have limited bribery opportunities that helped private firms operate. Second, the corruption crackdown may have interfered with personal connections between private firms and government officials to a greater extent than institutional connections between state-owned firms and the government. Overall, our findings suggest that corruption crackdowns may not restore efficiency in the economy, but instead lead to worse economic outcomes, at least in the short run (JEL L2, M1, O1).


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (07) ◽  
pp. 1883-1889
Author(s):  
Ada Mac- Ozigbo ◽  
Dr. Cross Ogohi Daniel

The relationship between diversification and firm performance varies among institutions and over time. Less is known about the advantageousness of diversification in economy-wide crises, which have occurred frequently in recent years Using data from a recent survey, we studied nearly 400 Nigeria private firms using two different approaches panel and cross-period comparisons. The findings of both approaches show that diversified firms performed better than focused firms. This was also true during the 2008 global financial crisis. The higher the diversification level, the more positive the firm performance was. We also investigated the influence of ownership structure. Firms that are totally owned by the founding owner and his/her family tend to have unsatisfactory performance under crisis. This finding provides evidence of the increasing attention on management and governance to explain firm. Linear regression models were evaluated to test the effect of diversification on firm performance. Panel A uses profit as the dependent variable, and Panel B uses sales. For each year (2007, 2008, and 2009), two regression models were evaluated: one testing the impact of diversification and the other testing the impact of the diversification level. We found that diversified firms performed better than focused firms during the recent global financial crisis. The diversification level was positively and linearly related to performance, that is, more diversified firms performed better. Moreover, we found that private firms that are totally owned by the founding owner and his/her family performed worse under crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Farooq ◽  
Harit Satt ◽  
Basma El Fadel

PurposeThis paper documents the impact of political uncertainty on the decision of private firms to use external auditors to verify their financial statements.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use the data from 141 countries and the pooled logistic regression to test our arguments. The data is provided by the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys and is collected during the period between 2006 and 2019.FindingsThe results show that firms with high exposure to political uncertainty are more likely to use external auditors to verify their financial statements. The results are robust across various sub-samples and hold when we use alternate proxy for political uncertainty. The results are also robust after controlling for potential endogeneity concerns. The authors also find that the effect of political uncertainty on the choice of external audit is more pronounced for firms that are headquartered in countries with weak institutional environment. The authors document significant role of democracy, rule of law and accountability in determining the relationship between political uncertainty and the choice of external audit.Originality/valueThe authors believe that theirs is one of the initial attempts (if not the first) to investigate the effect of political uncertainty on the choice of external audit among the private firms in developing countries.


2022 ◽  
pp. 0193841X2110727
Author(s):  
Khanh Hoang ◽  
Hieu T. Doan ◽  
Thanh T. Tran ◽  
Thang X. Nguyen ◽  
Anh Q. Le

Background Corruption affects businesses in various ways. Anti-corruption, on the other hand, can improve the institutions of the country as well as business operations. Vietnam, as a socialist-oriented country with an ongoing high-profile anti-corruption campaign, provides us a unique setting to evaluate the impacts of anti-corruption on corporate performance. Objectives We address two questions: (1) what is the effect of anti-corruption on the performance of private-owned firms in Vietnam? and (2) how does anti-corruption influence the performance of firms with state ownership (FSOs) in Vietnam? Research design To investigate the impact of anti-corruption on performance of firms with different ownership settings, we use the establishment of the Central Anti-Corruption Steering Committee of Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment for difference-in-differences analysis. We generate treatment effects of private holding and the state block ownership. To validate the findings, we construct a novel news-based anti-corruption index from Vietnamese online newspapers and use it in a robustness test to evaluate anti-corruption’s impacts on firm performance. Results and Conclusions We find a positive impact of the anti-corruption campaign on private firms’ performance, supporting the social norm perspective of how corruption affects businesses. The empirical results indicate a negative impact of the campaign on FSOs’ performance. The findings suggest that anti-corruption benefits private firms via improving the institutional quality of the country while improving the financial transparency of FSOs. Our study provides a method for measuring anti-corruption which is virtually unobservable and absent in the literature. The findings have implications for policymaking in contemporary Vietnam.


Asian Survey ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 997-1017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshihiro Kudo

Abstract The U.S. imposed trade sanctions against the Myanmar military government in July 2003. This action damaged Myanmar's garment industry in particular. This paper concludes that the sanctions' impact was inflicted disproportionately on small- and medium-sized domestic private firms and their workers.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ari Kokko ◽  
Tran Toan Thang

Foreign direct investment (FDI) may benefit local firms in the host country through various kinds of spillovers, but it may also raise competition and result in the crowding out of domestic firms. Using detailed firm-level data for the period 2001–2008, this paper examines the aggregate effect of FDI on the survival of domestic private firms in Viet Nam. We estimate the impact of both horizontal and vertical FDI and explore how the presence of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) influences the exit hazard for private firms. The results suggest that horizontal and upstream FDI raise the exit hazard significantly, while downstream FDI may reduce the hazard. The presence of SOEs has a direct negative effect on the survival odds of local private firms in the same industry, but there is also an indirect impact on the exit hazard from FDI. Local firms are more vulnerable to foreign entry in sectors with high SOE shares. Looking at the net effects of FDI during the period 2001–2008, we find that results vary between sectors and over time but that the overall impact has been surprising small. The paper also discusses policy conclusions and implications for empirical analyses of spillovers from FDI.


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