1,720,996 research outputs found
Does location matter in corporate finance? An empirical investigation on manufacturing SMEs and the consequences of being on the “wrong” side of the institutional border
No full textConsidering a population of manufacturing SMEs located in a common socio-cultural environment and divided by an institutional border, this work investigates the potential consequences of being sited on the “wrong” side of that border (i.e., the area with a longer delay in enforcing credit rights). According to our results, we cannot reject the hypothesis that locations affect the financing of SMEs, providing a contribution to the current debate on whether institutions are a source of comparative advantage (or disadvantage) in regional growth. Indeed, crossing that institutional border and assuming we detect a 10 % higher inefficiency, we expect to observe a lower financial debt ratio (-0.03) and a lower trade credit ratio (-0.06), as well as a higher shareholders’ loan ratio (+0.08) and lower investments in tangible fixed assets (-2733 TEUR). Policy implications concern the opportunity for a structural reform of the national institutional system, as well as the adoption of specific policies to support the SMEs located on the “wrong” side of the border, supporting their access to the capital market
Internationalization and financial constraints: opportunities, obstacles, and strategies.
Full text linkThis study delves into the relationship between financial constraints and internationalization,
investigating the role and extent of variability in access to the capital market in shaping internationalization strategic choices. In detail, focusing on the Italian manufacturing industry between 2013 and 2019, we examine this relation disentangling the effect between export and
import dynamics. Initially, we run various OLS regression models to investigate the profile of
exporting/importing firms, providing a preliminary picture of the internationalization process of
the Italian manufacturing industry. Then, we run several GMM regression models to highlight
these dynamics over time and to collect robust evidence for our hypotheses. According to the
results, we observe that firms under high financial constraints have the lowest intensity of import
and export flows (i), firms under moderate financial constraints have the highest intensity of
export flows (ii), and firms under low financial constraints have the highest intensity of import
flows (iii). An interpretation of these results concerns the heterogeneity of business-to-business
payment dynamics across the EU global value chain, with the Italian market characterized by
the longest delay. Hence, internationalization through export flows represents an opportunity for
those companies with the most aggressive business strategies, quickly raising their internal
liquidity, and complementing local financial debts with international trade credits. On the other
hand, only firms with no restrictions to the capital market can afford prompt payments of foreign
suppliers, easily collecting the necessary liquidity to support import flows
Innovation, financial constraints and credit rating scores
No full textThis manuscript investigates whether credit rating scores are a more appropriate measure to predict financial constraints of innovative firms than other common indexes proposed by the literature (e.g. Hadlock and Pierce, Kaplan and Zingales, Whited and Wu). The former measure has higher replicability, and fit is updated annually by financial institutions, while the latter relies on a specific sample of observations and outdated coefficients.
Considering the Italian automotive supply chain and its innovation process between 2017 and 2019, we propose an empirical strategy based on two steps. First, we compare the performance of credit rating scores with an alternative representative measure (i.e. size-age index), to determine the most effective approach. Second, we propose several econometric models to assess whether the proposed measure is robust to alternative hypotheses that might explain difficulty in collecting external financial resources.
According to our results, credit rating scores have a higher ability to predict whether firms are under financial constraints than the size-age index. Moreover, the results denote that firms with lower credit rating scores have greater difficulty in collecting external financial resources to fund new R&D projects, as do small firms with previous investments in their production process and innovative products
Financial constraints, institutional quality and import trade flows: An empirical investigation on Italian manufacturing SMEs
No full textThis work investigates the relation between local institutions and international business, considering the Italian manufacturing industry and SMEs’ import trade flows between 2015 and 2019. In detail, we test the hypothesis of whether courts’ inability to enforce contracts can amplify uncertainty on the market, discouraging foreign suppliers from performing international transactions. We interpret these expectations in terms of financial constraints, imagining that the quality of a legal system limits firms’ access to local financial resources, which are essential to guarantee such operations. The proposed hypothesis is assessed considering alternative explanations that might characterize importers: absence of ex-ante business networks on the global market (i), expected bankruptcy risks (ii) and asymmetric information (iii). Results are consistent to several robustness tests and, according to the collected evidence, we cannot reject the hypothesis that judicial quality might represent an institutional barrier to local SMEs, preventing their international business strategies
Internationalization and financial constraints: opportunities, obstacles, and strategies
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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