How does investment efficiency affect financial distress risk? Evidence from China

IF 4.3 2区经济学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance Pub Date : 2025-01-22 DOI:10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101024

Huixia Geng , Hongbing Zhu , Wei Theng Lau , Normaziah Mohd Nor , Nazrul Hisyam Ab Razak

{"title":"How does investment efficiency affect financial distress risk? Evidence from China","authors":"Huixia Geng , Hongbing Zhu , Wei Theng Lau , Normaziah Mohd Nor , Nazrul Hisyam Ab Razak","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101024","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Motivated by the high financial distress risk (Hereafter, FDR) level and extensively inefficient investment behaviors in China, this paper aims to explore the relationship between firms’ investment efficiency and FDR. Utilizing Chinese A-share market data spanning 2008–2020, we find that over-investment linearly exacerbates FDR, while under-investment has a U-shaped relationship with FDR. Detecting the underlying mechanisms, we find that over-investment exacerbates FDR through linearly declining firms’ cash holding and investing cash flow while increasing firms financing cash flow, and under-investment impacts FDR through the inverted U-shaped relationship with operating cash flow and U-shaped relationship with firms’ financing cash flow. Our findings hold up well after various robustness tests, providing new implications of firm life circle theory and static trade-off theory in the process of investment efficiency influencing FDR.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"45 ","pages":"Article 101024"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221463502500005X","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Motivated by the high financial distress risk (Hereafter, FDR) level and extensively inefficient investment behaviors in China, this paper aims to explore the relationship between firms’ investment efficiency and FDR. Utilizing Chinese A-share market data spanning 2008–2020, we find that over-investment linearly exacerbates FDR, while under-investment has a U-shaped relationship with FDR. Detecting the underlying mechanisms, we find that over-investment exacerbates FDR through linearly declining firms’ cash holding and investing cash flow while increasing firms financing cash flow, and under-investment impacts FDR through the inverted U-shaped relationship with operating cash flow and U-shaped relationship with firms’ financing cash flow. Our findings hold up well after various robustness tests, providing new implications of firm life circle theory and static trade-off theory in the process of investment efficiency influencing FDR.

查看原文

微信好友朋友圈 QQ好友复制链接

本刊更多论文

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文去求助

来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance BUSINESS, FINANCE-

CiteScore

13.20

自引率

6.10%

发文量

审稿时长

69 days

期刊介绍： Behavioral and Experimental Finance represent lenses and approaches through which we can view financial decision-making. The aim of the journal is to publish high quality research in all fields of finance, where such research is carried out with a behavioral perspective and / or is carried out via experimental methods. It is open to but not limited to papers which cover investigations of biases, the role of various neurological markers in financial decision making, national and organizational culture as it impacts financial decision making, sentiment and asset pricing, the design and implementation of experiments to investigate financial decision making and trading, methodological experiments, and natural experiments. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance welcomes full-length and short letter papers in the area of behavioral finance and experimental finance. The focus is on rapid dissemination of high-impact research in these areas.