Financial constraints and speed of working capital adjustment

PurposeThe study examines the existence of target level of working capital and the speed of adjustment toward the target for eight manufacturing sectors of Indian economy. In addition, this study examines the impact of financial constraints on the speed of adjustment.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on secondary financial data of 1936 Indian manufacturing companies from eight sectors for a period of 18 years (2000–2018). This study employs two-step GMM techniques to arrive at results.FindingsResults of the study confirm that firms do have target working capital, but the speed of adjustment from the current level of working capital to the target working capital is slow, and the speed of adjustment varies across sub-sectors. Moreover, we found that firms that are likely to be less constrained adjust their working capital quickly compared to firms facing high financial constraints.Originality/valueThis study contributes to working capital management literature by examining the speed with which the firms move toward their target and also the impact of financial constraints on the speed of adjustment across eight manufacturing sectors of Indian economy. Further, the study examines the impact of financial constraints on the speed of adjustment.

Capital Structure Theories and Speed of Capital Adjustment towards Target Capital Structure along Life Cycle Stages of Asian Manufacturing Firms

Purpose: Firms have different costs and benefits and asymmetric information across their life cycle stages and hence each stage has different financial pattern and speed of adjustment towards target capital. Methodology: We use System GMM to test the hypotheses. We use market leverages proxies for the capital structure, life cycle proxies: introduction, growth, mature, shakeout and decline and the control determinants of capital structure such as profitability, tangibility, firm size and growth opportunities. We estimate the financial pattern and speed of adjustment along life cycle stages of manufacturing firms from eleven Asian economies over the period of 2010-2018. Findings: The results show that firms in earlier stages have more long term debt than mature stage. The speed of adjustment towards target capital structure is highest in mature stage than the other stages. The control determinants significantly affect market leverages. Implications: The findings suggest that management has to consider life cycle stages of their firms in order to adjust capital structure. Stockholders should consider stage of firm with relation to profitability and capital structure for long term prospects.

Capital adjustment cost and inconsistency in income-based dynamic panel models with fixed effects

After the seminal work of Nickell (1981), a vast literature demonstrates the inconsistency of ‘conditional convergence’ estimator in income-based dynamic panel models with fixed effects when the time horizon (T) is short but the sample of countries (N) is large. Less attention is given to the economic root of inconsistency of the fixed effects estimator when T is also large. Using a variant of the Ramsey growth model with long-run adjustment cost of capital, we demonstrate that the fixed effects estimator of such models could be inconsistent when T is large. This inconsistency arises because of the long-run adjustment cost of capital which gives rise to a negative moving average coefficient in the error term. Income convergence will be thus overestimated. We theoretically characterize the order of this inconsistency. Our Monte Carlo simulation demonstrates that the size of the bias is substantial and it is greater in economies with higher capital adjustment costs. We show that the use of instrumental variables that take into account the presence of the negative moving average term in the error will overcome this bias.

FDI Asymmetries in Emerging Economies: The Case of Colombia

We build a DSGE model to study the asymmetries of FDI shocks in an economy like Colombia. Besides nominal wage and price rigidities, we use the fact that Colombia has two productive and differentiated regions, Bogota that produces more than 25% of Colombia GDP (DANE, 2016) and the rest of the country, Ricardian and non-Ricardian agents, habit formation, capital adjustment costs, and modeled an entire foreign sector. Empirical results show that even when in the long run results are not very different in terms of real output, the short run effects are asymmetric implying that a shock to FDI in the rest of the country might cause important microeconomic adjustments that could improve the distribution of income throughout the country.