O efeito moderador do dinamismo ambiental na relação entre estrutura de capital e rentabilidade de empresas brasileiras

Abstract

In 2010 Brazilian economy lived an accelerated growth, but it suffered a great slowdown in 2012. In an attempt to boost economic growth again, the Brazilian government combined tax relief, depreciation of the nominal exchange rate and reduced the basic interest rate. But this policy was not sustained for long and, in 2014, Brazil entered in a great recession. All these changes have altered and continue to alter the environment in which Brazilian companies are inserted, driving managers to create innovative strategies to position them in a competitive way. In this context, financing policies play an important role in the success of companies, while environmental dynamism determines the way in which they will make their strategies. Due to the risks and asymmetries of information inherent to dynamic environments, according to Simerly and Li (2000), companies inserted in environments with a high degree of dynamism tend to be less indebted, in order to ensure better profitability. This research then sought to analyze how environmental dynamism affects the relationship between capital structure and profitability by investigating 148 Brazilian companies distributed in 19 (nineteen) sectors between the years of 2013 and 2017. The results showed mineral extraction as the most dynamic sector, followed by the paper sector and the transportation and logistics services sector. The most stable sector was textiles, followed by the commerce sector and the construction sector. The average level of leverage of Brazilian companies in the period studied was 30.14% and the average return was - 0.52%. In contrast to the initial hypothesis, based on the study by Simerly and Li (2000), the results of this research showed that companies inserted in dynamic environments tend to be more indebted, guaranteeing better profitability. These results lead us to suggest that Brazilian companies had their capital structure strongly influenced by macroeconomic factors, especially the expansionist policy of the Brazilian government. Among the main contributions of this study are the articulation between finance and strategy, permeated by the peculiarities of Brazilian capitalism, which influence the strategic decisions about the capital structure of companies.