Relação entre a internacionalização e a estrutura de capital das empresas portuguesas

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Joanna Vanessa Luz
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/19595
• topic: Dados em Painel; Estrutura de Capital; Grandes empresas; Internacionalização; Pequenas e Médias Empresas; Portugal; Panel Data; Capital Structure; Large Firms; Internationalization; Small and Medium-sized Firms; Gestão

There is an extensive literature on the relationship between internationalization and the capital structure of companies, particularly when it comes to the mode of financing and the weight of debt. The various theories point to several arguments, some arguing that the presence in foreign markets accentuates the need for companies to resort to debt, others pointing in the opposite direction. Added to this is the importance that debt maturity has on the impact that internationalization may have on the capital structure. More recently, the empirical literature has argued that the relationship between internationalization and capital structure may be non-linear. This study aims to contribute to the literature by empirically analyzing the relationship between export activity and the capital structure of Portuguese firms. In this sense, a panel data model was estimated, based on an unbalanced sample of 6022 firms belonging to the manufacturing industry sector, which includes SMEs and large firms, in the period of 2011-2019. The hypotheses that the relationship between export intensity and capital structure is linear or non-linear and that the nature of the relationship is different when the destination of export activity is a higher or lower risk country were tested. The results of the estimations suggest that firms with higher export intensity resort more to short-term debt, with this relationship being statistically significant only for SMEs (the vast majority in the sample). The hypothesis of the existence of a non-linear relationship between internationalization and indebtedness was not validated for any of the debt maturities. Firms that export to destinations with lower risk than the domestic market tend to borrow more (confirming the upstream hypothesis), but only in what concerns total indebtedness. The downstream hypothesis, which predicts lower debt for firms exporting to riskier destinations, is validated only for long-term debt, and is not statistically significant for large firms.