Financial Constraints and Firm-Level Investment in Asia: Dynamic Panel Smooth Threshold Regression Approach

Author(s):  
Rashid Ameer
Author(s):  
Maty Konte ◽  
Gideon Ndubuisi

Abstract Several existing studies have documented a negative relationship between firm financial constraint and export activities but do not attempt to examine factors that could attenuate this relationship in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effect of financial constraint on exports in Africa and explore how the level of trust in countries where firms are located shapes this relationship. We combine the World Bank Enterprise Surveys with different measures of country-level personal and interpersonal trust computed from the Afrobarometer surveys of 19 African countries. Our results show that financial constraints negatively affect export activities. However, this negative effect is attenuated for firms that are located in trust-intensive societies. These findings are robust to different specifications. Interestingly, we find that small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa are more likely to be affected by financial constraints but also more likely to benefit from a higher level of both personal and interpersonal trust, while for larger firms only interpersonal trust matters.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135481662110424
Author(s):  
Zhike Lv ◽  
Ting Xu

To verify whether the effect of tourism on environmental performance differs by the level of tourism development, a panel threshold regression approach is applied to observe the effects of tourism on environmental performance in 97 countries over the 2002–2012 periods. Our results suggest that tourism always has a significant negative influence on the environmental performance, implying that tourism will unavoidably result in environmental degradation, irrespective of how high the level of tourism development. However, when tourism development exceeds a certain value, tourism will relatively have less influence on environmental performance. In terms of policy prescriptions, considering that tourism wills inevitably worse environmental qualities, this finding implies that policymakers should consider the optimal level of tourism development at around the estimated threshold level to minimize the negative impact of tourism on environmental quality.


Author(s):  
Carlos Carreira ◽  
João Eira ◽  
Filipe Silva

Measuring firms' financial constraints can prove to be a difficult task for researchers because it is not possible to directly observe whether a firm is financially constrained. This chapter surveys the existing methodologies to measure such constraints at firm level, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each one. In doing so, firstly, the authors review the direct and indirect measures of firms' financial constraints. Then they test the validity of the most commonly used indices using a large panel of (unlisted) Portuguese firms (2010-2017). The FCP index seems to outperform the other indices in capturing financial constraints of unlisted SMEs. This is not a surprising result, as most of the existing empirical literature on the field deals with listed (US) firms. It is not reasonable to expect that the coefficients of indices remain unchanged across countries and over time. Therefore, the authors propose their (re)estimation to apply them to different economies.


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