• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.29-38
• /
• 2017

Purpose - Prior theories predict a negative correlation between stock liquidity and dividend payout propensity. We test this hypothesis by examining the sample Korean retail firms. Research design, data, and methodology - We construct four different types of stock liquidity measures and investigate how these stock liquidity variables affect dividend payout propensity by employing the logit regression model. The retail firms listed in the KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets are analyzed from 1990 to 2015. Results - Our estimation results support the liquidity hypothesis if we adopt the stock turnover rate as the stock liquidity measure, particularly for the retail firms listed in the KOSPI markets and for non-conglomerate firms. Yet, our estimation results adopting the illiquidity measure of Amihud (2002), the proportion of non-trading day, and the volume of trading do not support the liquidity hypothesis. Conclusions - Our findings provide mixed results for the validity of stock liquidity hypothesis, which enriches the existing literature. In terms of turnover rate, the stock liquidity hypothesis holds robustly. Yet, we are not able to find any empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis if we use the other three measures of stock liquidity.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
• /
• v.10 no.7
• /
• pp.7-16
• /
• 2019

Purpose - Economic globalization provides firms with a new channel to gain benefits from foreign countries. Therefore, using the real MNEs, this paper set China's firms as an example to explore the relationship between multinationality and performance. Research design, data, and methodology - Panel data from 2008 to 2017 was used and 390 multinational firms listed in China's A-share market was selected. Additionally, related econometric methods were employed to analyze the relationship between multinationality and performance in this study. The return on assets was treated as a dependent variable, and the sales of a firm, the firm age, the debt asset ratio of a firm, the ratio of foreign sales to total sales and the enterprise properties were treated as independent variables. All of these factors were used to conduct an empirical analysis. Results - The empirical findings in this study revealed that there is a linear relationship between multinationality and performance, as well as that non state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) have a greater effect on the relationship between multinationality and performance than that of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Conclusions - On the basis of evidences this paper provided, China's government should take measures in the future to help China's firms when they fulfil international economic activities.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.19-27
• /
• 2020

This paper aims to empirically study the determinants of liquidity of Indian listed firms. To account for profit persistence, we apply a (pooled, fixed and random) effect models to a panel of Indian listed firms that covers the time period from 2010 to 2016. This study consists of 2154 firms operating in Indian market. Liquidity (LQD) of Indian firms is measured by liquid assets to total assets, whereas bank size, capital adequacy, profitability, leverage, and firm age are used as internal determinants. Further, economic activity, inflation rate, exchange rate, and interest rate are the external factors considered. The findings reveal that leverage, return on assets, and firm age are the essential internal determinants that impact the liquidity of Indian listed firms. Furthermore, among the internal determinants, the results indicate that firm size, leverage ratio, return on assets ratio, and firm age are found to have a significant positive association with firms' LQD, except leverage ratio and firm age has a negative relationship with firms' LQD. From this result, this article has provides helpful ideas and empirical evidence on the inner and external determinants of the companies mentioned in India is very useful to bankers, analysts, regulators, investors and other stakeholders.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.12 no.10
• /
• pp.75-84
• /
• 2014

Purpose - This article aims to examine whether the stock issuance of firms in the retail industry follows Myers' (1984) pecking order theory, which is based on information asymmetry. According to the pecking order model, firms have a sequence of financing decisions, of which the first choice is to use retained earnings, the second one is to get into safe debt, the next involves risky debt, and the last involves finance with outside equity. Since the 2000s, the polarization of the LEs (Large enterprises) and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) arose in the retail industry. The LEs exhibited an improvement in growth and profitability, whereas SMEs had a tendency to degenerate. This study contributes to corroborating the features of financing decisions in the retail industry distinguished from the other industries. Research design, data, and methodology - This study considers the stocks listed on the KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets from 1991 to 2013, and is more concentrated on the stocks in the retail industry. The data were collected from the financial information company, WISEfn. The empirical analysis is conducted by employing two measures of net equity issues (and), which were introduced in Fama and French (2005), and can be calculated from firms' accounting information. All variables are generated as the aggregate value of the numerator divided by aggregate assets, which, in effect, treats the entire sample as a single firm. Substantially, the financing decisions of the firms were analyzed by examining how often and under what circumstances firms issue and repurchase equity. Then, this study compares the features of the retail industry with those of the other industries. Results - The proportion of sample firms that show annual net stock issues reaching the level of the year's average was 54.33% for the 1990s, and fell to 39.93% per year for the 2000s. In detail, the fraction of the small firms actually increases from 45.08% to 51.04%, whereas that of large firms shows a dramatic decline from 58.94% to 24.76%. Considering the fact that the large firms' rapid increase in growth after the 2000s may lead to an increase in equity issues, this result is rather surprising. Meanwhile, net stock repurchases of assets are considerably disproportionate between the large (-50.11%) and the small firms (-15.66%) for the 2000s. Conclusions - Stock issuance of retail firms is not in line with the traditional seasoned equity offering based on information asymmetry. The net stock issuance of the small firms in the retail industry can be interpreted as part of an effort to reorganize business and solicit new investment to resolve degenerating business performance. For large firms, on the other hand, the net repurchase can be regarded as part of an effort to rearrange business for efficiency and amplifying synergy across business sections through spin-off. These results can help the government establish a support policy on retail industry according to size.

• Journal of Distribution Research
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.153-172
• /
• 1997

The distribution sector is affected by a wide range of regulations. Many of these are related to health and safety, others are related to urban planning and environmental issues, whereas some mainly have an economic basis. But, regulations many be unduly restrictive, in which case they can drive up costs and ultimately prices, or they may, in some cases, reduce consumer choice. Unduly restrictive regulations could also increase costs indirectly, by reducing competition and thus lead to lower productivity growth. In the past few years, distribution sector has gone through drastic changes due to deregulation and market opening. Implementation of regulatory reforms served as an opportunity to change laws and systems which had been an obstacle to development of distribution sector. Market opening of distribution sector became a turning point to promote competition among domestic and foreign firms. However, for small and medium scale of the typical retail enterprises which were in no position to compete in terms of prices, additional facilities, and services, faced a threat of diminished trading area, and even of their existence. Because, large firms may have greater market power than small firms, as they can more easily extract favorable terms when procuring goods, and may also be able to deter entry by advertising outlays or access to the best sites. In addition, larger chain stores armied with sufficient capital dominated trading area and reduced customer's welfare by abusing their monopoly power when competing with other shops, and are often cited as an example of adverse effects of local monopoly. In order to minimize such adverse effects and to foster competition, regulatory reforms in distribution sector should set its goal to promote sound and stable distribution activities through market principle and restoring competition principle, and ultimately to boost customers welfare. Therefore, deregulation in distribution sector should be implemented in a way to promote customers welfare, eliminate entry barriers, and expand competition principle such as productivity and efficiency competition. However, it should be also recognized that deregulation of system alone is not enough to develop the distribution sector. To compete in a increasingly concentrated industry, small enterprises increasingly engage in co-operative arrangements, such as buying groups, strategic alliances or franchise agreements.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.17 no.10
• /
• pp.41-48
• /
• 2019

Purpose - This study investigates whether financial analysts consider the intangible investment implicit in selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenditures to forecast firms' future earnings. Research design, data, and methodology - Using 52,609 U.S. firm-year observations spanning 1984-2016, this study examines the association between the Intangible investment implicit in SG&A expenditures and properties of analysts' earnings forecasts. To estimate the Intangible investment of SG&A, I decompose SG&A excluding R&D and advertising expenditures into maintenance and investment components following Enache and Srivastava (2017). Results - The main results show that analysts' earnings forecast errors and dispersion in analysts' forecasts increase with the intangible investment derived from SG&A because the investment component of SG&A affects future earnings and the uncertainty of those earnings. However, these results are weakened in the wholesale and retail industries where firms have a higher level of investment component of SG&A. I attribute the weaker results to low R&D expenditures in those industries. Conclusion - This study indicates that financial analysts incorporate the intangible investment of SG&A into their earnings forecasts differently across firms and industries. Furthermore, this study supports the argument for the separate reporting of the investment nature of SG&A from other operating expenses such as maintenance nature of SG&A.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.13-23
• /
• 2019

Purpose - Corporate activities for enhancing and improving corporate performance can largely be divided into exploration and exploitation. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of implementing organizational ambidexterity in SMEs, including distribution firms, by reviewing the extant literature and deriving the basis on which this strategy affects the managerial performance. Research, design, and methodology - The study uses a systematic review methodology, which employs a structured process to discern trends and meaningful themes across a wide body of literature on specific subjects and research questions. This qualitative study examined the influence of ambidextrous strategies of SMEs on firm performance, and the results were synthesized from the literature. Results - Organizational ambidexterity in SMEs is related to the firm's managerial performance. However, it is crucial to know that there are many ways to generate an ambidextrous organization, and decisions about what method to choose should be based on the environmental aspects of the enterprise. Conclusions - The following aspects should be considered for execution; : making practical decisions based on accurate information about the resources the firm has, considering the organizational level of human resources for implementing organizational ambidexterity, and sharing specific performance goals.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.47-55
• /
• 2020

Purpose: The issue of access to credit for private enterprises has been given an increased amount of attention given their crucial role in fueling economic growth. Vietnamese small and medium-sized businesses, however, face many obstacles in accessing financing for profitable investment opportunities, with up to 70% unable to access or obtain bank loans. This paper aims to address the factors affecting the credit accessibility of Vietnamese enterprises, and provide further insights of this issue under the new context of Basel II. Research design, data and methodology: We adopt a pooled sections approach to construct a sample of 155 firm observations before and after the implementation of Basel II accord in Vietnam and employing binary logistic regression and interaction terms for data analysis. Results: We find that firm characteristics (export participation, female ownership) and proxies for bank-borrower relationship (deposit, overdraft facility) have significant and positive effects on firm's access to credit. Notably, the sign of interaction coefficient shows that the implementation of Basel II tends to benefit small-sized firms in terms of credit accessibility. Conclusions: The finding further emphasizes the important role of relationship lending in Vietnam's credit market, which is even more critical for small firms when Basel II is universally applied as the new banking standards in the coming years.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.5 no.4
• /
• pp.9-20
• /
• 2018

Global rating agencies, such as Moody's and S&P, have assigned credit ratings to corporate bonds issued by Japanese firms since 1980s. Local Japanese rating agencies, such as R&I and JCR, have more market share than the global raters. We examine the yield spreads of 1,050 yen-denominated corporate bonds issued by financial firms in Japan from 1998 to 2014 and find no evidence that bonds rated by at least one global agency are associated with a significant reduction in the cost of debt as compared to those rated by only local rating agencies. Unlike non-financial firms, the reputation effect of global rating agencies does not exist for Japanese financial firms. We also observe that firms with less information asymmetry are more likely to acquire ratings from Moody's or S&P. Additionally, the firm's financial profile does not affect its choice to seek out ratings from global raters. Our findings are contradictory to those by Han, Pagano, and Shin (2012), who employ bonds issued by non-financial firms in Japan. Our conjecture is that the asymmetric nature of financial firms makes investors less likely to depend on a credit risk assessment by rating agencies in determining the yields of new bonds.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.7 no.8
• /
• pp.25-31
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this paper is to examine a financial distress premium in the emerging market. A risk-return trade-off of negative book equity (NBE) and distress firms is empirically analyzed using data from the Stock Exchange of Thailand. This research employs Ohlson's (1980) bankruptcy model as a measurement of distress risk. The results indicate that distress firms outperform solvent firms in the Thai market and deny distress anomaly often found in the developed market. Fama-Frech (1993) three-factor model and Carhart (1997) four-factor model verify the existence of a distress premium in the Thai capital market. Risk-seeking investors demand greater compensation for bearing risks of distress firms' going concern. This paper provides fresh evidence that default risk is a significant explanatory factor in pricing stocks in the emerging market. Also, this study sheds light on the role of NBE firms in asset pricing. Most studies eliminate NBE firms from their sample. However, NBE firms yield superior average cross-sectional returns, albeit with higher volatility. Investors are rewarded with distress risks associated with NBE firms. The outperformance of NBE firms is statistically significant when compared to the overall market. The NBE premium disappears when factoring size, value, and momentum in time-series analysis.