Dpto. Economía y Empresa

This paper investigates the influence of peer financial choices on the capital structure decisions of European and North American listed companies in the oil and gas sector. It also examines how commodity prices, particularly oil and natural gas prices, and their corporate hedging affect capital structure policies. The findings underscore the existence of peer effects in the oil and gas industry, indicating that companies consider their peers' financial decisions when determining their capital structure. Further analysis reveals that there is significant cross-country heterogeneity in capital structure peer effects conditional on financial and institutional development, and disclosure quality. Additionally, the research highlights that oil and natural gas prices, along with the hedging against these prices exposure, impact the capital structure of oil and gas companies, providing invaluable insights for industry practitioners and policymakers.

This paper explores the external financing–cash flow relationship in capital structure theory by comparing unlisted (financially constrained) and listed (financially unconstrained) companies. We postulate that investment is determined endogenously in the case of unlisted firms, as they are strongly dependent on internally generated funds (cash flow). Consequently, unlisted firms invest their cash flow in profitable projects, using any residual cash flow to increase their holdings of safe assets. In turn, listed companies determine their investment exogenously and may reduce leverage if they raise an excess of cash flow. As a result, listed companies would react more negatively to shocks in cash flow. Our findings reveal that both unlisted and listed companies show a negative external financing–cash flow relationship, that of the latter being clearly more intense.

Our evidence suggests that Spanish public firms adjust slowly toward their capital structure target, with the typical firm closing approximately one-fifth of the gap between its current and target debt ratios each year. This finding is in contrast with previous evidence; however, we employ econometric techniques specially designed for highly persistent dependent variables, like market debt ratios. Moreover, our evidence does not seem to indicate that macroeconomic conditions, at least under the conditions experienced by the Spanish economy during our sample period, affect the speed of adjustment. If anything, our results are consistent with faster adjustments during economic states in which the distance between the current and target leverage is the greatest.

We analyze the relevance of adjustment costs in keeping Spanish public firms away from their target leverage. We argue that firm's cash flow outcomes determine the importance of the adjustment costs on capital structure changes. Then, we estimate capital structure adjustment speeds across three different cash flow realizations. We report that during years in which either over-levered or under-levered Spanish public firms make changes in their financing decisions, as a result of their high cash flow realizations, they close significantly more of the gap between current and target capital structure than those firms with intermediate and low cash flow observations. Moreover, independently of the cash flow level, we find that leverage adjusts more quickly for over-levered than for under-levered firms.

This article explores the cash–cash flow relationship by comparing financially constrained and financially unconstrained companies. Unlike previous research, we test the sensitivity of cash to cash flow by considering unlisted firms as constrained and listed firms as unconstrained. Our empirical evidence is based on findings from Spanish firms and is consistent with the core rationale that unlisted firms face more difficulties than their listed counterparts when looking for funding from external markets. As a result, unlisted firms tend to hoard significant amounts of cash out of the generated cash flow, while listed firms do not. Our findings are robust to a number of additional empirical tests.

This study explores the role of taxes in explaining companies’ financing decisions. We test whether the corporate tax shields explanation of capital structure is applicable to firms listed on the Spanish stock exchange over the period 2007–2013. Taxes are found to be economically and statistically significant determinants of capital structure. Our results suggest that marginal tax rates affect the debt policies of Spanish listed companies, and the existence of non-debt tax shields constitutes an alternative to the use of debt as a tax shelter. Consistent with theoretical expectations, there is a stronger relation between debt and taxation in less levered firms. Finally, we empirically estimate the impact of the new thin-capitalization rule put forth by the Spanish government in 2012 on the financing behaviour of Spanish listed companies. Our empirical evidence supports the existence of a tax reform effect, where companies affected by interest deductibility limitations reduce their leverage more than companies that are not affected.

The potentially important impact of taxation on corporate financing decisions is widely recognized despite the fact that the empirical evidence is far from conclusive. In this study, we assess the debt tax benefits of Spanish listed firms throughout the period 2007-2013. Specifically, using a simulation approach, we found the capitalized value of gross interest deductions amounts to approximately 6.4% of firms’ market value, while the net debt benefit (of personal taxes) is estimated at 2.1%, in contrast to the traditional 11.4% (i.e. marginal tax rate times debt). Conversely, the panel data regression approach reveals a 13.6% (34.2%) debt tax shield in terms of firm (debt) value. This evidence supports the view that taxes influence corporate decision-making and that debt makes a reasonable contribution to firm value.

Los impuestos son, económica y estadísticamente, determinantes importantes de la estructura de capital de las empresas y, por tanto, no son un factor de segundo orden en las decisiones de endeudamiento de las empresas. Así lo prueba el trabajo de investigación realizado al que nos referiremos en las siguientes líneas.

The relevance of risk aversion as the key factor explaining the fluctuations of the economy is receiving increasing attention since the Great Recession. The role of financial shocks in the economic fluctuations and their associated amplifying effects are crucial aspects in the monetary policies followed by central banks around the world. The underlying mechanism behind these effects is directly linked to the time-varying behavior of risk aversion, especially during recessions. The reason is that risk aversion is strongly related to the behavior of the expected market risk premium, which is a fundamental input in the cost of capital and investment decisions of firms through the business cycle. In this research, we present an analysis of the interplay between the expected market risk premium, time-varying risk aversion, and economic uncertainty for the Spanish economy. We estimate risk aversion from aggregate consumption of Spanish households, while the expected market risk premium is extracted from options traded on the IBEX-35 index. Note that we put together variables from the real economy and financial markets. We show that both variables are positive and significantly related, clarifying the important connection between the real and financial sectors of the Spanish economy. More precisely, we show that both risk aversion and the expected market risk premia at alternative horizons are counter-cyclical, and that the slope of the term structure of the expected market risk premium is steeply downward sloping during recessions. Moreover, we find that risk aversion significantly amplifies the effects of adverse economic uncertainty shocks on the expected market risk premium. Therefore, it should not be surprising the collapse of financial prices when there is shock in uncertainty amplified by the increase in risk aversion. The corresponding rise in the expected market risk premium explains the drop in equity prices during bad economic times. The persistence of these effects depends on the nature of the economic crisis. In this framework, we understand both the initial dramatic drop in asset prices provoked by the exogenous COVID-19 crises, and the subsequent recuperation. To conclude, the positive association between uncertainty shocks, risk aversion and the expected market risk premium has extremely important consequences for the investment and output growth fluctuations of the Spanish economy.

La Comisión Europea ha planteado un itinerario digital para los países miembros de la Unión Europea (UE) cuyo objetivo es abordar el reto de la transformación digital para 2030, lo que nos permitirá mejorar nuestra competitividad y bienestar al mismo tiempo que cuidamos del planeta. En este artículo, utilizaremos los datos de la UE, de España y los recogidos en una encuesta propia realizada a las Mercas, para elaborar un análisis comparativo del nivel de digitalización y el empleo de especialistas TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones) de dichas Mercas con el de las empresas españolas y de la UE. Cabe destacar, entre los resultados obtenidos, que en los indicadores referidos al uso de software ERP (Enterprise Resource Management), tecnologías cloud y la realización de acciones de comunicación social media, las Mercas se encuentran por encima de la media de las PYMEs de la Unión Europea y de España.