Investigating three aspects of corporate finance within the context of GCC markets

Abstract

This thesis investigates three aspects of corporate finance, namely the determinants of firm’s long term investment represented by the net capital expenditures, the determinants of firm’s short term investment represented by working capital requirements and the capital budgeting practices - all within the context of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets. Despite the importance of these interrelated topics to decision makers and despite the great emphasis given to teach them in universities, few researchers investigated the determinants of both long and short term investments and out of those, most focused on developed markets. Moreover, almost all the existing studies investigated these determinants at the firm level with little evidence about macroeconomic factors. Besides, none have provided a comprehensive investigation of capital budgeting practices from a single market whether developed or emerging. Hence, this thesis completed three independent investigations. The first and second investigation presented in chapters three and four respectively, explores three categories of factors that are found in the existing literature, or predicted by this thesis to be associated with firm’s long and short term investments. These first two investigations utilize a pooled OLS regression for a panel data set covering the period from 2000 to 2014. Furthermore, the third investigation presented in chapter five explores a wide set of capital budgeting practices from a single frontier market within the GCC. Precisely, the investigation covers the development, the selection and the post completion stage of capital budgeting. It also, explores factors that are found in the existing literature or predicted by this thesis to influence the use of such practices. This investigation utilizes a survey questionnaire containing 23 questions to gather the required data. Finally, this thesis makes various contributions to the corporate finance literature. Specifically, chapter three and four extend the existing literature on the determinants of firm’s long and short term investments by examining it in the context of new emerging markets namely the GCC markets. Beside, revealing the positive effect of macroeconomic factors on firm’s investments. Chapter five extends the existing literature on capital budgeting practices by investigating three stages of these practices from the Omani market. Additionally, it provides new evidence related to the significant relation between capital budgeting practices and new firms characteristics.