基于价值创造和公司治理的财务状态分析与预测模型研究

我国约70%的上市公司处于价值损害状态。考虑到公司在对债权人违约之前,必先经历损害股东价值的阶段。因此,本文根据“价值创造观”(Value-Creation)来考察“价值损害型公司”的动态变化及其影响因素,并收集我国1998—2003年540家价值损害型上市公司的有关财务变量,首次引入公司内外部治理变量,应用“排序因变量模型”分析财务状态变化的影响因素,并采用“人工神经网络技术”,预测价值损害型企业的五种变化趋势:财务康复、财务转好、财务维持、财务转差或财务困境。结果表明:(1)总资产收益率等财务指标的改善,公司治理水平的提升或投资者保护程度的增强都有助于公司财务康复,反之则将导致公司陷入财务困境。(2)若公司在T年被界定为价值损害型公司,当采用T年和T+1年的数据分别构造“LMBP神经网络模型”来预测企业T+2年的财务状况的五种态势时,则预测准确率分别为55.1%和77.8%。(3)除财务指标外,股票超额收益率、本文构造的公司治理指数和投资者利益保护指数有助于预测价值损害型企业未来财务状态的变化趋势。     

Lending technologies,banking relationships,and firms’ access to credit in Italy: the role of firm size

This paper analyses the role of lending technologies and banking relationships on firms’ credit access in Italy. Using EFIGE firm-level data, we show that the depth and strength of firm–bank relationships have heterogeneous effects on credit demand and rationing probabilities depending on the size of the borrower. Multiple banking relationships alleviate financial constraints for small firms, while borrowing from a large number of lenders hinders access to credit for large companies. Small and medium-sized enterprises with a higher share of debt with the main bank have a lower probability of being credit denied, as debt concentration contributes to overcome the opacity problems typical of the SMEs. Long-lasting relationships, by reducing information asymmetries, significantly improve access to credit for small and large firms. Conversely, we find that medium-sized enterprises are more exposed to financing constraints as relationship duration increases, due to possible lock-in effects. Finally, firms maintaining banking relationships based on transactional technologies are more likely to be credit denied, while the use of relationship lending technologies improves credit availability for both small and large enterprises.     

Firm‐Specific Learning and the Investment Behavior of Large and Small Firms*

We examine a model of size distribution and growth of firms where firms learn about idiosyncratic productivity parameters through their production experience. Aggregate shocks, by adding noise to learning at the firm level, can produce different responses across firms. In particular, young firms, which are smaller on average than older firms and more uncertain about their productivity, can “overreact” to aggregate shocks. Such differences across firm sizes and ages, which arise here in a model with perfect financial markets, are often attributed to financial frictions that hit small and large firms differently.     

The financing of small innovative firms: the Italian case

Small firms encounter difficulties in collecting external finance due to greater information problems. For small innovative firms, whose activity is more difficult to evaluate, the cost of external finance could be even higher. This paper aims to shed light on special features in financial structures of small innovative firms, compared with firms of similar size that do not innovate. The evidence shows that small innovators rely less on financial debts and more on internal financial resources; no important differences appear for large firms. This is consistent with the view that information problems mainly affect small firms. Another finding is that small innovative firms show a lower investment sensitivity to cash flow than small non-innovative firms: it is likely that the high incidence of internal financial resources allows them more flexibility in deciding their investments. No difference in investment sensitivity to cash flow, by innovative attitude, is found for large firms.     

Measuring efficiency when competitive prices aggregate differences in product quality and risk

In perfectly competitive markets with homogenous goods, prices aggregate inputs and outputs into a money metric that allows production plans and, hence, firms to be ranked by their profitability. Standard techniques of efficiency measurement use this metric to estimate cost and profit frontiers that identify “best-practice” production, conditioned on these exogenous prices. However, when prices vary due to differences among firms in the quality of outputs and inputs and in how asymmetric informational problems are resolved, both quality and the production of information can be decision variables of the firm, and prices will have endogenous components linked to production decisions. For example, in banking, prices of financial inputs and outputs are linked to credit quality and, hence, to risk and, thus, aggregate both inputs and outputs and their risk characteristics as well as reflect how informational asymmetries in credit markets are ameliorated. This paper argues that these cases pose two serious problems for the standard techniques of efficiency measurement: (1) they underestimate inefficiency because, in conditioning on prices, they fail to account for the effects of suboptimal pricing strategies on profitability; and (2) in ignoring how production plans and pricing strategies affect market-priced risk, the standard techniques neglect the effects of different pricing strategies on the discount rate, on expected profit and, hence, on market value. Two alternative techniques that do not condition their frontiers on prices and that account for risk are described to show how they measure the efficiency of different pricing strategies as well as production plans. These two alternative models for measuring efficiency are employed to study how differences in pricing strategies affect the efficiency and market value of highest-level bank holding companies in the United States in 1994.     

Financial and economic determinants of firm default

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm default. Our analysis covers a large sample of medium-sized limited liability firms. Since default might lead, through bankruptcy or radical restructuring, to firm’s exit, our work also relates to previous contributions on industrial demography. Using non parametric tests we assess to what extent defaulting firms differ from the non-defaulting group. Bootstrap probit regressions confirm that economic variables, in addition to standard financial indicators, play both a long and short term effect. Our findings are robust with respect to the inclusion of Distance to Default and risk ratings among the regressors.     

Firm growth and liquidity constraints: evidence from the manufacturing and service sectors in Italy

We use a large firm-level panel data set to analyse the relevance of liquidity constraints on firm growth in Italy. In most European countries, mainstream financial institutions are scantly able to provide affordable credit facilities to small firms. Thus, these firms are forced to finance their growth almost exclusively through retained earnings. We estimate a dynamic version of Gibrat-law, incorporating cash flow as a measure of financial constraints, for two different size classes within small and medium size enterprises and for several industries in manufacturing and service sectors. The findings show that, in general, small manufacturing firms have higher growth-cash flow sensitivities with respect to medium firms. Conversely, our results highlight, for the services, a significant heterogeneity in the impact of liquidity constraints on firm growth. In particular, the sensitivity of growth rates to the cash flow appears relatively high for small firms belonging to Knowledge Intensive Business Services. Validation of Gibrat-law in the services suggests that an important group of industries, with a superior capacity of encouraging firm’s competitiveness, need more financial resources to promote their growth and that of the manufacturing sectors with whom they are connected.     

Bank versus nonbank financial institution lending behaviour: indictors of firm size,risk or ownership?

Using 1251 matched commercial loan deal terms of listed companies over the period 2003–2014, we examine the heterogeneity of lending behaviours of bank and nonbank financial institutions. The results show that large firms have a higher likelihood of getting loans from nonbank financial institutions. Compared to banks, nonbank financial institutions are more likely to provide credit help to high operation risk firms. State-owned listed firms have a higher probability to get finance from nonbank financial institutions than private firms, which highlights the situation that private firms are in a weak position to get credit help from China’s financial system. Moreover, the process of increasing the banks’ noninterest income ratio tends to drives firms to borrow from nonbank financial institutions.     

How do neighboring peer companies influence SMEs’ financial behavior?

Recent research into corporate finances has found that the financial decisions of peer companies are related. Companies tend to “kept an eye” on the decisions of other peer companies, among other things, trying to overcome the limitations caused by the lack of information. This paper further examines these interactions including geographical proximity among companies. With this aim, we use a heterogeneous Partial Adjustment Model on a sample of 12,444 small and medium Spanish manufacturing industrial companies. We find strong nonlinearities in the adjustment processes of liquidity, indebtedness and profitability ratios associated with basic characteristics of the companies such as size, technology, age or financial imbalances. Our results indicate that the influence of the environment on the financial behavior of each company, and its responsiveness, vary in function of neighbor firms’ characteristics.     

银行业如何支持实体经济的供给侧改革?--基于企业进入退出的视角

当前中国经济已进入新常态,着力推进供给侧结构性改革是未来我国经济工作的主要内容。在此背景下,作为我国金融部门主体的银行业应如何支持实体经济的供给侧改革,真正实现提高金融服务实体经济效率的问题值得关注。文章利用我国工业企业数据探讨银行业结构如何推动行业全要素生产率的增长,研究结果表明：中小银行的发展可以改善信贷配置结构进而有效地降低行业资源的错配程度,提高行业生产率。中小银行的发展不仅可以提高“僵尸企业”的生存风险,迫使其退出市场,还可以缓解高效率企业生产扩张所面临的融资约束,促进高效率企业成长。因此,银行业结构的优化有利于信贷资源的优化配置,对化解“僵尸企业”难题、推动供给侧结构性改革具有重要意义。     

Analyzing long-term average adjustment of financial ratios with spatial interactions

The aim of this paper is to put forward a beta convergence model using spatial interaction to evaluate the dynamics of financial ratios. We overcome some of the limitations that come from the traditional partial adjustment model by relating both models. We show that the parameters of the two models may be connected. As an example, we discuss the case of a large sample of medium to high-tech industrial small and medium enterprises (SMEs) located along the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Our findings support the existence of a long-term average adjustment process in the financial ratios of this set of companies which depends on the characteristics of the firms in their neighborhood.     

Financial innovation in the UK

This study employs a national survey of over 1100 British financial firms to ascertain the determinants of financial innovation and their sales success using the logit and the generalized Tobit models. We find that the likelihood of financial innovation rises with the size of financial firms, employee education, greater expenditure on research and development, the availability of finance and the extent to which firms cooperate with each other. Perceptions of economic risk and innovation costs are also influential. R&D, cooperation and human capital are the main variables driving the success of financial innovation, measured by the percentage share of innovations sold. Firms in London/the south have a significantly greater tendency to innovate, though Scotland also does well. Stock broking, fund management and related activities are more innovative than firms in the financial intermediation and pension/insurance sectors.     

Financial Development and Inequality in the Global Economy

We build a heterogeneous firms model with firm‐specific wages and credit frictions to study the role of financial development for inequality in the global economy. If there are many small (non‐exporting) firms, better access to external funds reduces wage and profit inequality as well as unemployment. In contrast, if there are many large (exporting) firms, financial development might have opposite effects – especially if trade costs are low. In summary, the implications of financial development for inequality depend on the size distribution of firms and on the costs of exporting. Trade liberalization, however, raises inequality unambiguously.     

财务公司在集团公司的功能定位和现实挑战

我国财务公司在功能定位上存在缺失,实质上只发挥了结算中心和内部银行的功能,在投融资和外汇业务等方面仍受到政策管制,在风险管理方面则缺少有针对性的管理手段。完善财务公司在集团内的功能,势必需要财务公司在功能定位上向战略性财务控股公司的方向发展,在经营模式上向行业银行或集团金融平台的方向发展,在风险管理上向更精细化的方向发展。     

Monetary policy and the financial decisions of firms

Summary. In this paper we develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous, long-lived firms where financial factors play an important role in their production and investment decisions. When the economy is hit by monetary shocks, the response of small and large firms differs substantially, with small firms responding more than big firms. As a result of the financial decisions of firms, monetary shocks have a persistent impact on output. Another finding of the paper is that monetary shocks lead to considerable volatility in stock market returns.Received: 20 November 2003, Revised: 26 August 2004 JEL Classification Numbers: E5, G3.T.F. Cooley, V. Quadrini: We have received helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from Jeff Campbell, David Chapman, Thomas Cosimano, Joao Gomes, Boyan Jovanovic, José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, and Harald Uhlig. Correspondence to: V. Quadrini     

Simultaneity between strategic variables: Production,innovation, and product differentiation

This paper aims to analyze the existence of simultaneous effects among the variables production, product differentiation, and innovation. Microeconomic data from a sample of 2,160 firms are used as a base. Empirical results show that a positive correlation exists from innovation to product differentiation, thus showing that it is in the process of production itself, through technical improvements, where product differentiation is determined. On the other hand, no positive effect exists from product differentiation to innovation, i.e., once technical improvements have been established, firms exchange the barriers to entry created by brand image for the real barriers established by innovation itself. Lastly, the importance of the firm size in explaining the other endogenous variables analyzed is confirmed. This paper has received financial support from the Valencian Institut of Economic Research (IVIE). The study was carried out within the framework of research program SEC94-1357 of the Comisón Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT).     

Financial conservatism fosters job creation during economic crises

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse the phenomenon of financial conservatism in firms’ capital structures and relate it to their employment variation for a sample of Spanish companies during the 2008–2013 period, characterized by a sharp crisis and very high unemployment rates. Financial conservatism is described as following a low-leverage/high cash no-short-term capital structure policy. We use the noisy selection model that relates growth, age, and size, to which we add a dummy indicating financial conservatism. As the growth of a company is measured as its number of employees’ variation, we are ultimately analysing how financial conservatism affects job creation. The objective of this work is to stress the advantages of a financially conservative policy as the evidence shows that such a policy at a given enterprise is a positive factor for job creation, which in Macroeconomics terms means an improvement in economy’s employment. The average conservative company more likely to foster job creation is a small company belonging to the industry or services sector.     

The micro-firm health insurance hypothesis

The objective of this study is to investigate the ‘micro-firm health insurance hypothesis’, a hypothesis that the greater the percentage of domestic firms that are ‘very small’, i.e. have four or fewer employees, the greater the percentage of the US population that will be without health insurance. The focus of this study is based on the premise that very small firms (as defined), ‘micro-firms’, which constitute 58.6% of all private sector firms in the US, face bargaining-power, financial, and competitive constraints that tend to limit their ability to provide group health insurance benefits to their employees, with the result being that employees at very small firms are relatively more likely than employees at larger firms to be without a health insurance fringe benefit. Weighted Least Squares (WLS) estimates provide strong empirical support for the hypothesis.     

Which factors improve the performance of the internationalization process? Focus on family firms

This study aimed to analyse the impact that the financial features and characteristics of the ownership structures of international companies exert on the performance of their internationalization process, as perceived by managers, and attempted to detect differences between family firms (FF) and nonfamily firms (non-FF). In addition, the impact of these characteristics and others related to FF, such as family ownership and generation, on the perceived performance of their internationalization is analysed. Based on a sample of Spanish companies with direct investment in China, the results indicated that, from the managers’ perspective, being an FF and having lower financial leverage exerted a positive effect on the performance of the internationalization process. Moreover, the study proved that this performance was strongly and positively related to the financial results of the company, and this positive effect was even stronger in the case of FF. Finally, the findings also showed that FF with a higher involvement of the family in their ownership recognized a better performance of their internationalization process. These results will be useful for companies that are considering the value of internationalization as a strategy to improve or maintain their financial results, and they also highlight certain differences between FF and non-FF.     

Small firms,bigger changes: health insurance coverage take-up rates in small firms after the ACA

Measuring the impact of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) on employer-sponsored health insurance is essential in an era of constant changes to health policy. Using data from the Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Survey, we focus on firms with fewer than 50 employees in order to isolate the effect of the ACA on small firms. We utilize a differences‐in‐differences approach with a time fixed effect structure to provide analysis for a treatment group of small firms and a control group of large firms. After excluding firms with grandfathered plans, we find that the ACA provisions reduced health insurance coverage take-up rates in small firms by 1.96 to 2.67 percentage points (compared to large firms).