Cash holdings of listed and unlisted firms: new evidence from the euro area

This paper examines the cash holdings behavior of listed and unlisted firms. We argue that unlisted firms, which are smaller, face a greater wedge between the cost of external and internal finance and as a result they need to rely more on the later. Relying on internal funds means that firms have a precautionary motive to hold cash. We test our theory using an unbalanced panel of mainly small medium enterprises within the euro area over the period 2003–2017 paying special attention to the role of financial pressure, financial constraints and the recent financial crisis. Our findings reveal that unlisted firms hold more cash than their listed counterparts due to precautionary motives. In addition, when considering the effect of financial pressure, the results show that the difference in cash holdings between listed and unlisted firms exhibit a ‘U-shaped’ relationship. Finally, unlisted firms have a higher sensitivity to save cash out of cash flow than listed firms. Our results are robust to using different specifications and different financial pressure measures.     

Structure, conduct, and performance: evidence from the Indonesian food and beverages industry

This article employs the Structure–Conduct–Performance (SCP) paradigm to investigate the simultaneous relationship between industrial concentration, price rigidity, technical efficiency, and price-cost margin in the Indonesian food and beverages industry. This research extends the SCP framework by including price rigidity and technical efficiency as additional key variables. The results suggest that there is a simultaneous relationship between industrial concentration, price rigidity, technical efficiency, and price-cost margin with a positive bi-directional relationship between industrial concentration and price-cost margin. These findings imply that an appropriate course of action for the regulator in this highly concentrated industry is to reduce industrial concentration in order to increase competition, reduce upward price flexibility, and increase technical efficiency in the long run.     

Estimating farmers’ productive and marketing inefficiency: an application to vegetable producers in Benin

This paper estimates the technical and marketing inefficiency of a sample of urban vegetable producers in Benin. Marketing inefficiency is defined as the failure of farmers to achieve better marketing output and is reflected in lower output price indices. The study proposes a Russell-type measure of inefficiency using a directional distance function that accounts simultaneously for the expansion of outputs and price indices and the contraction of variable inputs. A truncated bootstrap regression is used in the second stage to consistently analyze factors that underlie differences in inefficiency. The first-stage results suggest that vegetable producers are more inefficient with respect to marketing than production. The second-stage results indicate that technical inefficiency is affected by the production environment and private extension services. Marketing inefficiency is affected by the type of marketing arrangements.     

U.S. hegemony and international business research: Further considerations

The commentaries in this issue raise many insightful questions and considerations regarding the Livanis and Geringer (Thunderbird International Business Review, 2023, 64) study and we address a few of these. In particular, we focus on the following five areas: (i) the relationship of international business (IB) publications with the English language, (ii) resource constraints and IB research, (iii) institutional rewards and IB research, (iv) methodological considerations in evaluating IB research productivity, and (v) opportunity costs of pursuing a Ph.D. and IB research and publication.