Financiamento e retornos anormais: uma análise das empresas brasileiras de capital aberto

Abstract

This research proposes a new methodology for testing the pecking order theory and the relationship between corporate financing choices and abnormal returns to shareholders. In the analysis of firm’s financing choices, this methodology takes internal and external financing capabilities into consideration, for different cash holding policies, and from the perspective of company’s administrators. It also suggests ways to operationalize concepts unclearly established in theory and adopted in former empirical research, but only partially addressed before. Furthermore, through the standardization of concepts in the analyses of financing choices and abnormal returns, it is made easier to compare and jointly interpret their results. The proposed methodology is tested in the analysis of financing decisions made by a sample of publicly traded nonfinancial Brazilian companies. The relationship between these decisions and stockholders’ abnormal returns was also tested within the same framework. The results provide evidence of good adherence of their financing decisions to the pecking order theory and that, once we control for the firm’s financing capabilities, having a financial slack is valued by the investors. It was also identified that the share issue can be positively interpreted by the market, in ways that are consistent with the pecking order theory, as long as the preferred funds sources are insufficient and that the stockholder’s abnormal return is, at least, median. The research results suggest that the proposed methodology is capable of addressing commonly reported capital structure empirical testing problems. Due to its conceptual structure and controls, the adopted approach can also be adapted to other analyses based on corporate funds flows, not being restricted to capital structure analysis.