Ownership structure and inventory policy

This paper explores the effect of a firm's ownership structure on its inventory policy. We have argued that the presence of institutional investors like banks as blockholders, reduces a firm's liquidity needs and prevents overinvestment policies. This, in turn, leads to lower inventory levels, especially for small and/or diversified firms. Also, we expect less inventory investment when bank equity financing is compared with bank debt financing. Finally, other components of ownership structure like the number of blockholders prevent overinvestment that may generate excessive inventory accumulation. We have proved these theoretical contentions making use of a database of Spanish manufacturing firms

Long-term and short-term labor contracts versus long-term and short-term debt financial contracts

This paper has three objectives: First to analyze the interaction between the basic internal contracts that shape the firm (labor and financial contracts). In particular we show how their temporal dimensions are related. The linkage between firm-s internal contracts and the project choice (short-term or long-term) is the second objective of our study. Finally, we check how sensitive are the type of financial intermediary (banks or markets) to the relations previously studied. These results allow us to rationalize several facts that characterize the US-UK financial system and the German-Japanese ones. As a direct implication of our theoretical model, sorne empirical tests are proposed which are particularly relevant to describe sorne features of the current Spanish economy

Impact of the Operations Manager's dual role on inventory policy

In modern corporations, the Operations Manager’s role in defining of firm’s strategy is becoming more important. In this paper we describe how firms can use this tendency for Operations Managers to make strategic decisions as a mechanism to prevent inventory mismanagement. These managers have incentives to speculate with inventory cost reductions, thereby avoiding sharp reductions in a single period, because it would hinder further reductions in the future. Remarkably, firms may prevent such behavior by stimulating the Operations Managers’ strategic orientation, without losing sight of inventory-efficient management

Firms’ stock market flotation: Effects on inventory policy

In this article, we argue that firms that are floated on the stock market are subject to close scrutiny by financial markets, which hinder them from implementing the type of empire-building overinvestment policies that may generate inventory accumulation (the signaling role of inventories). Also, listed firms have more resource availability to finance their investment projects and do not need to use inventories as a tool for dealing with their liquidity requirements (the liquidity role). Taking into account both these roles—signaling and liquidity—our main hypothesis is that after a firm is listed on the stock market, there is a decline in its inventory level as well as in its inventory variability, especially in those firms with larger liquidity needs (i.e., small firms and/or firms with financial difficulties).We further argue that the reductions in inventories will be larger for equity issues than for debt issues. Using a sample of US manufacturing firms for the period 1994–2004, we find evidence that conforms to our theoretical predictions, suggesting a natural stabilizing mechanism that may smooth the economic cycle.Publicad

Bank debt and market debt: an empirical analysis for Spanish firms

This paper examines the effect on the firm's banking cost of the issue of debt securities. We argue over the existence of a positive relationship between the issue of market debt and the reduction of firm's banking cost. This idea relies on three main arguments: i) Banks can delegate to investors the supervision task, a feature that makes bank supervision less costly. ii) The issue of public debt increases firms' bargaining power in front of the banks, as the former can get funds through non-bank financing ch annels. iii) Banks with no prior information on the issuing firm may interpret the issue of debt securities as a positive signal of firm's quality. Additionally, we argue that the previous effects are less important for non-first issues and are sensible to the maturity of the bond issued. We empirically test these and other related theoretical results making use of a database of Spanish non-financial firms during the 1993-1998 period. We find empirical support for our theoretical contentions

An extension of a model of financial contracts and labor contracts

Using an artiele by Garvey and Swan (GS) 1992 as a benchmark, we extend their model to deal with the issue of the optimal financial structure for a firm when the interaction between labor and fmancial contracts is considered. The GS artiele coneludes that debt financing is Pareto superior to equity financing. We show that once we introduce a model, with more "complete" contracts, and sorne dynamic features, their results are no longer valid

Managerial turnover and worker turnover

We study the influence of the manager's degree of consolidation within the firm over the firm's labor policy. We argue that non-consolidated (recently-appointed) managers are more worried about short-term results than consolidated managers are. This feature leads the former to bias the labor contracting favoring short-term contracts. This has two main consequences. First, a higher variation in the number of workers hired in each period. And second, a lower increase in unitary labor costs. To contrast these results, we use a database of 1.054 Spanish companies during the period (1994-98), and analyze their managerial turnover as well as their corresponding variation in the number of workers and in unitary labor costs. The theoretical results are confirmed, especially for highly-productive R and D-intensive firms

Ownership structure and inventory policy

This paper makes use of a database of Spanish manufacturing firms to explore the effect of a firm's ownership structure on its inventory policy. We have argued that the presence of institutional investors reduces a firm's liquidity needs and prevents overinvestment policies. This, in turn, leads to lower equilibrium inventory levels. Also, we expect, on average, less inventory investment when bank-equity financing is compared with bank-debt financing. Finally, other components of ownership structure like the number of blockholders prevent inventory overinvestment. This may have an impact on the economic cycle as more firms are floated on the stock market hence changing their ownership structure.Publicad

Banks as blockholders

In this paper, we analyze the effects of banks as main blockholders on a firm's returns and on the concentration of ownership in the hands of the controlling blockholders. Compared with previous studies, we approach to this problem by taking into consideration the type of blockholders building up coalitions with banks for controlling a firm. This allows us to reconcile different results, reported in relevant literature, on the impact of banks' ownership of a firm on its returns. In short, we argue that the effect is only negative when banks are the main blockholders or when they build up coalitions with other banks. We prove empirically our theoretical contentions making use of a sample of Spanish firms for the period 1996-2000

Inventories, financial structure and market structure

In this paper, we study the effect of different financial contracts on the firm's inventory policy. Doing so will allow to define the best financial instruments to diminish the stock variability of a profit-maximizing firm in a given economic environment (expansion or recession), and for a given market structure. We show that in periods of recession (expansion), reducing (increasing) the amount of short-term debt is an optimal strategy independently of the market structure.Publicad