The Impact of Financial Flexibility on Investment Ability and Firm’s Value Enhancing

 
Journal of Accounting Advances (J.A.A)
Vol. 4, No. 2, 2012, Ser. 63/3
 
 
Extended Abstract
 
The Impact of Financial Flexibility on Investment Ability and Firm’s Value Enhancing
 
 Dr. A. Rahmani               F. Gholami Gakieh               Dr. K. Pakizeh
 Alzahra University              University of Economic Sciences, Tehran
 
Introduction
A critical challenge for companies is how to sustainably supply the required cash for ongoing current activities and long term capital investments. This required cash is supplied by internal sources such as retained earnings as well as by external sources such as new issued debt and capital. Although financing methods are affected by various and numerous internal and external factors, recent studies show that the most important factor which affects financing affairs is financial flexibility and this financial policy is going to be the dominant pattern in financing strategy.
 
Research Question
The research questions are as follows:
1) Does financial flexibility have a positive impact on firm’s investment?
2) Does financial flexibility have an impact on value enhancing?
So research hypotheses are as follows:
1) Financial flexibility has a positive impact on firm’s investment.
2) Financial flexibility has an impact on value enhancing.
 
Research Method
In this research we use spare (unused) debt capacity to measure financial flexibility. Our criteria for measuring investment and value enhancing are capital expenditure and stock return, respectively. Then, we have used multiple regressions to assess the relationship between the research variables. Our sample consists of 77 Tehran stock exchange firms and the sample period is during1999-2010.
 
Results
Despite our expectations the results show that financial flexibility doesn’t have a positive impact on investment. This finding indicates that first research hypothesis about positive impact of financial flexibility on investment, is rejected. Other results show that financial flexibility has an important positive impact on firm’s value enhancing and financial flexible firms are valuable from market participants and investor’s point of view. By this finding, research hypothesis about impact of financial flexibility policy on value enhancing is accepted.
 
Discussion and Conclusion
In this paper, we studied the interaction between financial flexibility and investment. Despite o our expectations, the results suggest that financial flexibility significantly has a negative impact on capital investments, thus, our results are in contrast to theoretical basis as well as works of Arsalan (2009) and Marchica and Mura (2010), but our result is consistent with the Iranian works of Khodaee and Zare (2010) in which they argued that in Iranian stock market financial flexibility has no impact on capital investments decisions.
In addition, we performed a long-run performance analysis to test whether financial flexibility policy is genuinely value enhancing. The results of our study related to the association of financial flexibility and value enhancing reveals that α coefficient (which shows the effect of unique properties on return) is not equal between the companies which are financial flexible and non-financial flexible. It is high and positive in financial flexible firms and it is low and negative in non-financial flexible firm which is consistent with the Marchica and Mora (2010) study. This result suggests why the majority of companies are using this approach in financing of their operations.