• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.47-57
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• 2015

This study examines whether successful stand-alone firms have more difficulties than the successful firms affiliated to business groups in external financing. The easiness of external financing is measured by investment-cashflow multiple. Controlling the effects on the multiple of the past business performances and the expectation of future business performances, we investigate how the ownership type affects the multiple. The empirical results show that, when cashflows are positive, the stand-alone firms exhibit higher investment-cashflow mupltiples. When cashflows are negative, however, the opposite is true, even though the statistical significance of the result is rather low. These results do not support the general idea that stand-alone firms must have more disadvantage than subsidiary firms in raising funds from outside. If member firms of business groups have no big trouble financing externally, then the above results imply that stand-alone firms do not either identify external financing as a major difficulty in running business. Thus, if the government seeks to formulate the selective policies supporting only the promising start-ups, instead of the general policies benefiting random start-ups, then the start-up financing policy should have a lower priority.