Decisões de investimento, racionamento de crédito e ciclo de vida das companhias abertas brasileiras

Abstract

The relationship between investment and financing is one of the most explored issues in corporate finance. Literature has shown that financial constraints are linked to firm’s ability to finance and credit rationing is linked to the ability of financial agents on offering credit for companies that request financing. In this context, the aim of this research is to show evidences of the effect of credit rationing, instead of financial constraints, and Life Cycle Stages (LCS) on the investment-cash flow sensitivity of public companies operating in Brazil. For this purpose, the sample included annual accounting information of public companies operating in Brazil, from 2010 to 2016, structured as a balanced panel. The financial information was extracted from the Thomson Reuters® database. Also, additional information was collected from Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM) and Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES). On the final sample there is 169 firms, with 1,183 observations. The investment models (original and modified) were estimated using the generalized moments system (GMM-SYS) approach developed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998). The finds of this research show that investment-cash flow sensitivity approach by itself, does not explain the behavior of investment decisions of Brazilian companies. This thesis show evidences that investment decisions are more affected by availability of credit than by their cost. This results demonstrate that the variable credit amount are more important than the interest rate in the conduct of the monetary policy. Regarding life cycle, it was identified that the investments of the non-mature firms behave differently in stages, this results which makes it sensitive to the models (original and modified) employed here. Initial results by LCS, and considering all LCSs in the original investment model with and without the inclusion of control variables, showed that only endstage companies have investments that are more investment-cash flow sensitivity and, as expected, mature companies are not reliant on internal resources to invest. However, on the modified investment models (which includes all non-maturity LCS with and without the inclusion of control variables) and for the two LCS classifications (PARK; CHEN, 2006; DICKINSON, 2011) the initial stages (birth and growth) and the final stages (turbulence and decline) were statistically significant and positive. This evidences show that investment decisions of non-mature companies are dependent of internal resources. Finally, the main result of this analysis is that the volume of resources retained determines the investment decisions of the non-mature firms. However, the small number of observations and the impossibility of obtaining the accounting information of private companies were important limiters for the study.