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Recent reforms across Eastern European countries have given more flexibility and information to parties to engage in secured debt transactions. The menu of assets legally accepted as collateral was enlarged to include movable assets (e.g., machinery and equipment). Generalized difference-in-differences tests show that firms operating more movable assets borrowed more as a result. Those firms also invested more, hired more, and became more efficient and profitable following the changes in the contracting environment. The financial deepening we document triggered important reallocation effects: firms affected by the reforms increased their share of fixed assets and employment in the economy.

Private investment can be an important engine of economic growth in East African countries that are plagued with adverse economic conditions, despite recent growth rates. Against this backdrop, there has been substantial penetration of mobile money, moving beyond simple person-to-person exchanges towards adoption by private firms. This study explores whether there is a relationship between firm adoption of mobile money and firm investment. Using firm-level data that are nationally representative of the private sector in three East African countries—Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—a positive relationship is found between mobile money use and firm's purchase of fixed assets. This relationship is attributed to reduced transaction costs, increased liquidity, and increased credit worthiness associated with the use of mobile phone financial services. The finding is largely driven by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

We study the valuation of collateral by comparing spreads on loans by the same bank, to the same borrower, at the same origination date, but backed by different types of collateral. Pledging collateral reduces borrowing costs by 23 BPS on average. The effect varies across different types of collateral, with marketable securities being most valuable, and real estate and accounts receivables and inventory being more valuable than fixed assets and a blanket lien. Further, the rate reduction from pledging collateral is sensitive to the value of the underlying collateral, and collateral tends to be more valuable for smaller and private firms and for loans with longer maturity.

This paper examines whether firms manipulating their reported financial results make suboptimal investment decisions. We examine fixed asset investments for a large sample of public companies during the 1978-2002 period and document that firms that manipulate their earnings-firms investigated by the SEC for accounting irregularities, firms sued by their shareholders for improper accounting, and firms that restated financial statements-over-invest substantially during the misreporting period. Furthermore, following the misreporting period, these firms no longer over-invest, consistent with corrected information leading to more efficient investment levels. We find similar patterns for firms with high discretionary revenues or accruals. Our findings suggest that earnings management, which is largely viewed as targeting parties external to the firm, can also influence internal decisions.

This paper examines the significance and robustness of four measures of growth of the firm with respect to firm-level Total Factor Productivity (hereinafter TFP). These four measures are (a) growth of total assets, (b) growth of sales, (c) growth of fixed assets, and (d) weighted growth of fixed assets. The four measures are examined in the business and economics literature in different contexts. The results of related studies do not include a consensus regarding the validity of a certain measure. The ultimate objective of this paper is to present a realistic view of growth of the firm.The data used in this paper represent the non-financial firms listed on DJIA30 and NASDAQ100. These data were obtained from Reuters Finance database© (https://www.reuters.com/markets/) and cover the quarterly periods from June 1992 till March 2018The results of the robustness test show that (a) firm-level TFP is positively associated with weighted growth of fixed assets, (b) the estimates of weighted growth of fixed assets are robust which is an indication to the intrinsic relationship with firm-level TFP, (c) the significance of weighted growth of fixed assets varies across industries which reflects an industry effect. This paper contributes to the related literature by examining the robustness of the common measures of growth of the firm. As far as growth of the firm and size are exchangeable, the lack of conformity in the literature raises a controversy regarding the search for a reliable measure of size and growth of the firm.

This research focused on the development of small farms, which in many countries form the basis of the agricultural sector. The specifics of this type of farm, as well as the way in which they operate, influence the possibilities for these farms to realise the model of sustainable agriculture. This study considers income and the rate of reproduction of fixed assets as the main measures of farm development, which are influenced by a number of endo- and exogenous factors. The research period covered 2017–2021, and the subjects of analysis were small individual farms located in Greece, Portugal, Lithuania, and Poland. The figures for the research were taken from the FADN system database. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of endogenous agricultural factors on the development of small farms as measured by farm income and reproduction of fixed assets in four selected European Union (EU) countries, i.e., Greece, Portugal, Lithuania, and Poland. Spearman’s non-parametric rank correlation method was used to assess the impact of endogenous factors. Selected on the basis of correlation relationships, the farm development factors showed a significantly higher correlation with farm income than with the reproduction of the farm’s fixed assets. The analysis indicated that, irrespective of the location of the farm, factors significantly affecting income levels included the area of agricultural land and the number of full-time employees. Only in some countries was there a statistically significant correlation between farm income and the share of leased land, the number of full-time workers per 100 ha of UAA, the share of hired labour input, as well as the level of total farm subsidies received.

Abstract—The article considers methodological and informational problems related to calculating the dynamics of fixed assets (fixed capital) in the Russian economy over 1990–2000. Special aspects of measuring the fixed assets performance using various statistical classifiers, the effect produced by the base of comparable prices on assessing the performance and reproduction characteristics of fixed capital are analyzed. Calculated estimates of its rate of change in the context of certain types of economic activity for 2005–2019 are given; and a possible direction for their refinement is also proposed.

This study used China’s accelerated depreciation policy (2014–2015) as an exogenous shock to examine the impact of tax incentives on firm financing structures. Based on data from China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2017, we estimated a difference-in-differences model and found that the accelerated depreciation policy increased firms’ liability–asset ratio. Moreover, this rise was mainly seen in firms’ current liability–asset ratio (i.e., short-term leverage), while long-term leverage remained stable, which shortened firms’ debt maturity. The mechanism exploration showed that the accelerated depreciation policy stimulated fixed asset investment, and this investment increase was mainly financed by short-term debt, leading to greater maturity mismatch between firm assets and liabilities. Further heterogeneity analysis showed that the observed rise in short-term leverage was more serious among firms that were less likely to be allocated long-term credit from banks, including small-sized firms and those with a low share of tangible assets.

The environmental tax burden on Chinese firms is continuously increasing. How do firms respond to environmental tax pressure to achieve sustainability? This study aims to investigate whether environmental tax burden affects firms’ total factor productivity (TFP), an important indicator of sustainable development. Utilizing panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2018–2022, we find that environmental tax burden positively impacts Chinese firms’ TFP. Interestingly, the impact of environmental tax burden on TFP is mediated through fixed asset investment rather than technological innovation. This indicates that in the short term, the pressure of environmental tax on Chinese firms has not triggered the Porter Effect. Additionally, this effect is stronger in larger firms, non-state-owned firms, and sample firms with weaker financial constraints and lower transaction costs. Therefore, different firms can flexibly adopt different business strategies to achieve sustainable development when facing environmental tax burden.

Average distances are widely used in many fields for calculating the distances between two sets of elements. This paper presents several new average distances by using the ordered weighted average, the probability and the weighted average. First, the work presents the probabilistic ordered weighted averaging weighted average distance (POWAWAD) operator. POWAWAD is a new aggregation operator that uses distance measures in a unified framework between the probability, the weighted average and the ordered weighted average (OWA) operator that considers the degree of importance that each concept has in the aggregation. The POWAWAD operator includes a wide range of particular cases including the maximum distance, the minimum distance, the normalized Hamming distance, the weighted Hamming distance and the ordered weighted average distance (OWAD). The article also presents further generalizations by using generalized and quasi-arithmetic means forming the generalized probabilistic ordered weighted averaging weighted average distance (GPOWAWAD) operator and the quasi-POWAWAD operator. The study ends analysing the applicability of this new approach in the calculation of the average fixed assets. Particularly, the work focuses on measuring the average distances between the ideal percentage of fixed assets that the companies of a specific country should have versus the real percentage of fixed assets they have. The illustrative example focuses on the Asian market.