Relação entre as alavancagens operacional e financeira e o dilema risco-retorno

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a survey that aimed to analyze the relationship between risk and return of the companies in the Basic Materials sector of the BM&FBOVESPA and their respective financial and operational leverage. In this sense, accounting variables and the business market were collected from that sector from Economática® software between the years 2010 and 2014. The analysis of the data employed in the following techniques: descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis. We found a clear and consistent increase in financial leverage of companies in the Basic Materials sector of the BM&FBOVESPA over the period studied. Moreover, it showed the preference of these companies by third-party capital at the expense of equity in all the years analyzed. Through multiple regression analysis, we estimated two models: (a) Model I (dependent variable - Risk); Model II (dependent variable - Return). The Financial Leverage was considered quite significant in Model I, however, did not provide a satisfactory level of significance in Model II. Furthermore, contrary to expectations, the operating leverage was not considered significant in both models estimated. It should be noted also that two independent variables were statistically significant in two models: the company's growth status and its EBITDA margin.