ساختار مالی شرکت ها، تخصیص نامناسب و بهره وری کل عوامل

This paper studies the quantitative relevance of the cross-sectional dispersion of corporate financial structure in explaining the intra-industry allocation efficiency of productive factors. I solve a heterogeneous firms model with financial constraints and distortions to the marginal rental-rate of capital, and develop a measure for the intra-industry misallocation of factors of production. The distribution of capital rental rate and two types of firm-level balance sheet characteristics (pledgeability and liquid asset positions) determine the extent of misallocation and industry level total factor productivity (TFP). I calibrate the model using firm-level balance sheet data from seven major industry clusters of the US economy. The counterfactual policy experiments show that weakening the observed balance sheet positions for financially constrained firms leads to a reallocation of production factors from firms with high cost distortions to firms with low cost distortions and cause quantitatively important industry level TFP losses.

Understanding the rationale behind the empirically observed dispersion of financial structure across firms is a central research theme in corporate finance. The seminal article by Modigliani and Miller (1958) shows that when markets are complete, a firm’s financial structure is not relevant for its economic performance; and therefore, the industry-wide dispersion of financial structure should not be related to the heterogeneity of firms’s profitability. Following the Modigliani–Miller proposition, a non-exhaustive list of empirical studies have shown that weak financial conditions constrain access to capital at the firm level and deteriorate firm profitability when there are credit market imperfections.1 In this paper, I contribute to the debate on financial structure and economic performance by exploiting a novel research angle: I study the relevance of corporate financial structure in explaining the cross-sectional allocation efficiency of productive resources in an economy with capital market imperfections.

This paper studies the sensitivity of production input distortions at the firm level with respect to firm financial characteristics and the implications of this sensitivity for industry-wide firm productivity dispersion and aggregate industry TFP. Basically, in this paper I have studied the effects of financial pledgeability and asset liquidity on capital–labor choice when there are capital market distortions, in terms of heterogeneity in capital rental rates.