Determinantes da politica de dividendos: evidência empírica para as empresas não financeiras cotadas na Euronext Lisbon

The problematic of dividends paid out by firms has deserved the attention of several studies, theoretical and empirical, on corporate finance. This article intends to contribute to the theme by determining the factors that influence a firm’s dividends` policy. In this sense, it investigates the effect of a set of factors on the dividends paid out by issuing non financial firms belonging to Euronext Lisbon. Results suggest the existence of firm specific characteristics influencing its dividends policy. A firm’s Cash-flow and its stocks` market price seem to have a positive impact on the dividends paid out to stockholders. In issuing non financial firms that belong to the PSI 20 Index results additionally show the existence of a negative effect of net profits on dividend’s payment.

Desempenho empresarial e o valor da empresa no mercado de capitais: evidência empírica para o mercado de capitais português

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the effect of firms’ performance indicators in explaining the price of stocks in the Portuguese capital market, using a fundamental analysis. In the empirical setting, firms’ performance indicators are gathered into two groups: (1) economic and financial indicators and (2) stock market indicators. Using a sample of 38 firms quoted at Euronext Lisbon, estimates are obtained trough an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model and report to December, 31 2007. Results suggest that performance indicators are able to explain the firms’ stock market price. There is a significant positive impact of sales growth and of payout ratio, while we find a statistically significant negative effect of the firm’s financial autonomy on the stock market price for the majority of firms quoted at Euronext Lisbon.

Style and performance of international socially responsible funds in Europe

This paper analyses the performance and investment styles of internationally oriented Socially Responsible Investment (SRI)funds, domiciled in eight European markets, in comparison with characteristics-matched conventional funds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-country study, focused on international SRI funds (investing in Global and in European equities), to combine the matched-pairs approach with the use of robust conditional multi-factor performance evaluation models, which allow for both time-varying alphas and betas and also control for home biases and spurious regression biases.In general, the results show that differences in the performance of international SRI funds and their conventional peers are not statistically significant. Regarding investment styles, SRI and conventional funds exhibit similar factor exposures in most cases. In addition,conventional benchmarks present a higher explaining power of SRI fund returns than SRI benchmarks. Our results also show significant differences in the investment styles of SRI funds according to whether they use “best-in-class” screening strategies or not. When compared to SRI funds that employ simple negative and/or positive screens, SRI “best-in-class” funds present significantly lower exposures to small caps and momentum strategies and significantly higher exposures to local stocks.

Eficiência logística e os seus impactos financeiros: uma analise ao tecido empresarial português.

Numa época em que a competitividade é máxima, torna-se imperativo reduzir os custos internos das organizações. A logística detém um papel fundamental na criação de valor, cabendo-lhe garantir as boas praticas de uma eficiente e eficaz gestão empresarial. A literatura sugere sistemas de avaliação de desempenho que traduzem a eficiência da prestação do serviço ao cliente, em termos de disponibilidade, prazos de entrega, velocidade, flexibilidade, entre outros. Este estudo tem como principal objectivo analisar e verificar a importância da eficiência logística e o seu impacto no desempenho financeiro do tecido empresarial. Neste âmbito, atendendo á metodologia definida pela literatura, esta investigação fundamenta-se na analise dos indicadores de desempenho financeiro e logístico. Os procedimentos metodológicos desenvolveram-se a partir de uma pesquisa amostral, constituída por um grupo de grandes empresas pertencentes aos sectores de actividade económica(industria transformadora e comercio) com maior representatividade no valor acrescentado bruto(VAB) português. Adoptamos o modelo do lucro estratégico ajustado, considerando como variáveis dependentes: i)resultado operacional, ii)rentabilidade do activo e iii)rentabilidade dos capitais próprios, e como variáveis independentes: i) imobilizações corpóreas, ii)stocks, iii)dividas de clientes e iv)rotação de stocks. Pelos resultados obtidos, este estudo evidencia, através de regressoes lineares múltiplas, que a eficiência logística contribui para o bom desempenho financeiro. Estas regressões permitem concluir uma correlação entre as variáveis do desempenho logístico e as variáveis do desempenho financeiro, demonstrando que a variação das primeiras afecta as segundas. A variável independente rotação de stocks é aquela que nos permite concluir, com maior nível de confiança, que a eficiência logística contribui para o desempenho financeiro das empresas. Principalmente, em particular no sector do comercio português.

A relação entre a performance ambiental e a performance financeira das empresas

This study examines the relationship between the environmental performance and the financial performance of Portuguese corporations, based on a sample of 35 stocks listed in the Euronext Lisbon stock exchange, for the period from 2000 to 2004. Corporate environmental performance is measured by an analysis of the environmental information disclosed in 2003 corporate annual financial reports. Stock market-based measures, such as return, risk and risk-adjusted return measures, are used to evaluate corporate financial performance, for the 5 years observation period. We use the portfolio studies and contingency tables methodology to evaluate the relationship between corporate environmental disclosures and corporate stock market performance. The empirical results suggest that companies that do not disclose environmental information have a superior financial performance – as measured by return, risk and risk-adjusted return – than those that disclose environmental information. In particular, companies with better environmental reporting, which disclose qualitative and quantitative environmental information, are the ones with worse financial performance. Nevertheless the differences found in financial performance are not statistically significant. The empirical results are thus adverse to the more recent view of environmental performance as a competitive advantage, maybe due to the still relatively small importance of environmental issues to companies and investors.