Structural Changes of Organizational Maturity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Lithuania

Organizational maturity is a dynamic construct and a change that depends on both internal and external conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to examine, from the perspective of organizational maturity, what challenges companies faced during the economic slowdown, when decisions had to be made quickly, but very responsibly. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organizations and their activities has led to a response from organizations to find solutions that are sustainable and not only able to survive the economic downturn, but also able to achieve/maintain a higher level of organizational maturity. Although information on the changes in the organizational maturity structure observed in organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic is already available, there is little research in this area. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to reveal changes in the organizational maturity structure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors used a qualitative research strategy to identify which indicators of organizational maturity elements and sub-elements occurred in the companies surveyed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of experts in both studies consisted of 24 top executives from 24 companies, 12 at each stage before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research disclosed that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies made sustainable decisions and they greatly strengthened the hard areas related to technology, work processes, and contributions to the organization’s operations. Meanwhile, the soft areas, related to employee competencies and, on the other hand, behavioural processes have become more vulnerable.

Generational Socioemotional Wealth and Debt Maturity: Evidence from Private Family Firms of GIPSI Countries

In this paper we investigate the relationship between generational socioemotional wealth (SEW) and debt maturity structure in private family firms of GIPSI countries for the period 2010-2018. This appears to be quite an important issue to study, given that SEW is a peculiar aspect of family firms and its impact on the debt maturity structure, still relatively unexplored, is likely to change according to the generation running the family business. We show that the importance attached to SEW decreases when moving from the firms’ founder to the subsequent generations, with a negative effect on the amount of long-term debt. The forward-looking orientation of first-generation family firms favours long-term credit by banks in order to expand a healthy business which can be inherited by future generations. These businesses are hence perceived as less risky and more value-creating by external creditors, compared to later-generation family firms. Alternatively, SEW preservation is often less of a target in later-generation family firms, because some descendants consider the firm simply as a source of extra finance and conflicts of interest often arise between multiple generations or different family branches entering the business. Short-term debt may then be employed as a signaling effect of the quality of the firm. At the same time, borrowing long-term capital may become difficult if lenders question the creditworthiness of these businesses. This issue emerged dramatically during the sovereign debt crisis, when a significant contraction of credit to firms was observed throughout the GIPSI countries.

The impact of contract enforcement efficiency on debt maturity structure using mathematical derivation and comparative static analysis

In recent years, the systematic use of advanced mathematical methods to express, study and argue economic theories has become an important branch and research hotspot in economics. The choice of debt maturity structure is an interesting economics issue in corporate finance. The signing of debt financing contract is not only the enterprises’ independent behavior, but also will be affected by the contract environment. Differences in the contractual environment will inevitably lead to differences in the efficiency of contract enforcement between borrowers and lenders in debt contracts. This paper introduces the contract enforcement efficiency factor on the basis of the standard structure model constructed by Holmstrom and Tirole, and then theoretically investigates the influence mechanism of contract enforcement efficiency on debt maturity structure based on the mediating role of contract enforcement efficiency on the investors’ liquidation claims. By transforming the financing contract into a linear programming problem, and then solving the optimization model, mathematical derivation and static comparative analysis, the research shows that as the efficiency of contract enforcement increases, the amount of short-term debt and long-term debt increases, while the direction change in debt maturity structure is uncertain and the specific relationship between them is closely related to the magnitude of all exogenous variables.

Determinants of corporate debt maturity: Evidence from the consumer goods sector in Vietnam

Debt maturity structure plays an important role in enterprises’ capital structure policies, and debt maturity varies from industry to industry. The paper investigates the determinants that affect the debt maturity structure of listed firms in the consumer goods industry from 2009 to 2019. The data is collected from consumer goods companies listed on the Vietnam Stock Exchange. The feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) estimation is demonstrated to consider not only micro but also macroeconomic variables that have influenced the corporate debt maturity policy. The empirical results show that five microeconomic factors, such as capital structure, asset structure, asset liquidity, profitability, and firm size, have influenced the debt maturity and are statistically significant. Meanwhile, macroeconomic factors such as inflation rate and credit growth have significantly affected the corporate debt maturity. Finally, the paper provides some suggestions for financial managers on the optimal corporate debt maturity in the consumer goods sector and recommendations for policy-makers when implementing macroeconomic policies.

Are Family Firms More Levered? An Analysis of Family and Non-Family Firms

This study analyzes the leverage policies of the family and non-family firms of eight East Asian Economies (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan) by using combined data of 690 family and non-family firms with 3,224 firm–years over the period 2006–2010. This study has used an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression for analyzing the data for the first question, while for the second question, logit regression has been used as the dependent variable (a binary variable). Prior research on family and non-family firms has revealed that family firms issue less (high) debt than non-family firms. Our analysis on a sample of East Asian Economies discloses that family firms have significantly different leverage levels than non-family firms, but their signs are not consistent. On the contrary, when the owner works as CEO/Chairman or member of the Board of Directors, then the family firms issue less debt than the non-family firms. Besides that, this study adds a new question that has not been addressed in the prior studies. The new question has focused on the speed of leverage adjustment. It is found that family firms and non-family firms regarding their debt maturity structure (short-term debt and long-term debt), the speed of leverage adjustments, and their decision to issue securities (i.e., debt vs. equity) are not significantly different. This study concluded that though family firms have a strong influence on each economy, but in South-East Asian countries, leverage policies of the family firms are not much different than that of non-family firms.

Analyzing the impact of board vigilance on financial distress through the intervention of leverage structure and interaction of asset tangibility in the non-financial sector of Pakistan

This study focuses on the relationship between board vigilance and financial distress in non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). The mediating role of leverage structure and moderating role of asset tangibility is also studied following Baron and Kenney’s approach. The study analyzed the data of 284 firms ranging from 2013 to 2017 by using ordinary least squares (OLS) and panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) regressions. The study revealed that the debt maturity structure mediates the relationship between board independence and financial distress and between CEO non-duality and financial distress but the capital structure did not mediate any of the stated relationships. Similarly, asset tangibility negatively moderated the relationship between debt maturity and financial distress. However, there was no such moderation detected between the relationship of capital structure and financial distress. The results remained consistent throughout the analysis with both regression techniques. These results suggest using more long-term debt in debt maturity structure to have control over financial distress and also to reduce the reliance on non-productive tangible assets in the asset structure of non-financial firms of Pakistan.