Empresas não-financeiras e o impacto da estratégia Maximizing Shareholder Value sobre o emprego no Brasil

Abstract

The financialization of capitalist economies has steadily grown in importance over the last decades. One of its features is that of maximizing shareholder value, which leads non-financial companies to prioritize the financial sector at the expense of the productive sector, to focus on financial profits and to increase dividend payments to shareholders. Workers are directly affected, since many of them lose their jobs as a consequence of these activities. In order to shed some light on this issue, this dissertation investigates whether this behavior was observed over 79 non-financial publicly traded companies operating in Brazil during 1997 and 2013. Results indicate that these institutions have increased dividend payments throughout time and leading to the argument that these companies have adopted the strategy of maximizing shareholder value (MSV). In order to evaluate the impact of this strategy on the labor market, we draw on the Chain Reaction Theory and on González and Sala (2013), in order to employ an econometric model to estimate the influence of MSV on job creation, using investment as a link between the financial sector and the productive sector. According to the results of Two-Stage Least Squares method, dividends have a negative impact on the investment rate and the investment rate, by its turn, has a positive influence on employment. Our results thus support the hypothesis that MSV is a strategy with deleterious impacts on the productive sector. Regarding the financialization, these companies are in an incipient stage of this process, since variables related to this phenomenon exhibited behavior contrary to the expected.