No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This paper investigates whether product market power affects trade credit decisions. We exploit the 2007-08 credit crisis in the U.S. as a source of variation in the importance of product market power for trade credit. We find that a one standard deviation increase in market power is associated to a decrease in payables of approximately four days during the crisis, showing that high market power firms alleviate financial constraints from their suppliers to avoid the loss of monopoly rents. Our inferences are robust to structural and non-structural measures of market power, both at the firm and at the industry levels, and the inclusion of controls to address potential confounding effects deriving from other firm features, including financial constraints, industry specific shocks and macroeconomic effects.Abstract: This paper investigates whether product market power affects trade credit decisions. We exploit the 2007-08 credit crisis in the U.S. as a source of variation in the importance of product market power for trade credit. We find that a one standard deviation increase in market power is associated to a decrease in payables of approximately four days during the crisis, showing that high market power firms alleviate financial constraints from their suppliers to avoid the loss of monopoly rents. Our inferences are robust to structural and non-structural measures of market power, both at the firm and at the industry levels, and the inclusion of controls to address potential confounding effects deriving from other firm features, including financial constraints, industry specific shocks and macroeconomic effects.Abstract: This paper investigates whether product market power affects trade credit decisions. We exploit the 2007-08 credit crisis in the U.S. as a source of variation in the importance of product market power for trade credit. We find that a one standard deviation increase in market power is associated to a decrease in payables of approximately four days during the crisis, showing that high market power firms alleviate financial constraints from their suppliers to avoid the loss of monopoly rents. Our inferences are robust to the use of structural and non-structural measures of market power, both at the firm and at the industry levels, and to the inclusion of controls to address potential confounding effects deriving from other firm features, including financial constraints, industry specific shocks and macroeconomic effects.

This article investigates the determinant factors of supply and demand for trade credit by micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), using data collected in a survey of managers from 481 firms in 32 cities in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais (Brazil) between 2008 and 2010. The multivariate relationship model proposed here is grounded in trade credit, agency and transaction costs theories. This study is based on a technique known as path analysis that uses a system of simple regressions estimated by simultaneous equations. The main results show the following: (i) trade credit and short-term bank loans are supplementary (and not substitute) sources of funds for MSMEs, which demonstrates that trade credit can be used by financial institutions as an indicator of the creditworthiness of the company; (ii) the proportion of credit sales, the days sales outstanding measure and sales growth are positively related to the amount of trade credit demanded, which suggests that trade credit is transferred along the supply chain; and (iii) the supply of trade credit is positively related to the importance that management ascribes to both internal capital and bank credit, which illustrates the strategic use of the supply of trade credit to increase sales. These results have important implications for companies' managers, financial institutions and the government agencies responsible for formulating policies that support and promote the development of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Este artigo investiga os determinantes do estilo de condução da gestão financeira de curto prazo em micro e pequenas empresas (MPEs), à luz dos fundamentos das teorias de crescimento das firmas por estágios, da visão baseada em recursos, de crédito comercial, de agência e de custos de transação. Os dados obtidos por meio de um survey com dirigentes de 447 MPEs dos estados de Minas Gerais e São Paulo foram analisados por técnicas multivariadas, tendo sido identificados quatro estilos de gestão de capital de giro, que podem ser explicados por variáveis como idade, tamanho e lucratividade da firma. Os resultados foram comparados aos obtidos por pesquisa similar realizada com empresas do Reino Unido (Howorth & Westhead, 2003), e a evidência mostra diferenças importantes: (a) as empresas brasileiras revisam a maioria das rotinas de capital de giro com maior frequência que as britânicas; (b) as MPEs brasileiras ofertam menos crédito comercial que as britânicas. Essas diferenças podem ser explicadas, pelo menos em parte, pelo maior custo do financiamento bancário das firmas brasileiras em comparação com as britânicas.

Context: natural experiments or quasi-experiments have become quite popular in management research. The differences-in-differences (DiD) estimator is possibly the workhorse of these techniques. Objective: the goal of this paper is to provide a tutorial that serves as practical guide for researchers considering using natural experiments to make causal inferences. Methods: we discuss the DiD advantages, concerns, and tests of validity. We also provide an application of the technique, in which we discuss the effect of government guarantees on banks’ degree of risk, using the 2008 financial crisis as a natural experiment. The database used, as well as the Stata and the R scripts containing the analyses, are available as online appendices. Conclusion: DiD may be used to tackle endogeneity concerns when treatment assignment is random.