With the increased presence of foreign institutional investors in emerging stock markets, academic interest on the effects of foreign institutions on corporate managerial decisions has notably increased. This paper joins this debate by investigating the effects of foreign institutional ownership on cash holdings, a strategic corporate financing choice. Analysing a sample of firms from 23 emerging economies, the paper shows that, while foreign institutional ownership has a negative effect on cash holdings, it also increases the contribution of cash to firm valuation. These effects are potentially transmitted to cash through mitigation of agency conflicts and alleviation of financing constraints. In all, our findings suggest beneficial effects of foreign institutions on firms' financing structure, as foreign investors contribute to a more efficient and value-enhancing cash policy.
This paper examines the effect of political uncertainty on stock returns, exploiting an exogenous shock to political stability in Brazil. In May, 2017, a conversation between Brazil's President and a businessman was bugged by Brazilian Police and leaked to the media. This led to sudden political instability and a collapse in the equity market. We decompose the cross-sectional variation of abnormal returns around this event and investigate whether corporate political connections and exposure to foreign capital were factors in the price falls. Our results show that firms connected with the Brazilian state-owned development bank, BNDES, and firms cross-listed via ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) were most affected by this shock. The evidence suggests that political connections and foreign capital exposure are factors in channeling political risk to asset prices, increasing the cost of equity capital during periods of political instability.
This study analyzed the relationship among capital structure, cash holdings and firm value for a sample of publicly traded Brazilian firms, through panel data regressions, employing the fixed-effects estimator. Initially, it was estimated regressions between capital structure (debt to total capital) and cash holdings (cash to assets), as well as between cash holdings and short and long-term debt. Next, it was applied a regression among firm value, capital structure and cash holdings. The results of this study suggested that debt, both short and long-termed, is negatively related to cash holdings, and that the level of cash holdings is also associated to a lower leverage. The study also presented indirect evidence that financially constrained firms hold more cash. Regarding to the impact of the capital structure on the firm value, short-term debt, long-term debt and the financial constraint had negative marginal effects on the firm value, suggesting a risk-averse behavior of investors in relation to debt. Cash holdings, instead, is valued as positive by investors, but up to an optimum threshold level. Further, the market capitalization is discounted with respect to cash holdings (inverted U-curve), in synergy with static trade-off theory of cash holdings.
We study the effect of stock market integration on the cost of capital and investment, using Brazil as a case study. We show that integration, as proxied by foreign ownership, has a positive impact on the financing side by reducing cost of capital. On the output side, we find that integration increases corporate investment, but only for well‐governed firms. We contribute to the debate on the pros and cons of financial globalization, particularly by providing evidence of important linkages between financial integration and real economic activity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.