Distinctive determinants of financial indebtedness: evidence from Slovak and Czech enterprises

Abstract

Research background: Indebtedness indicators are used to monitor the structure of corporate financial resources. The company's share of its own and foreign resources affects the financial stability of the company. A high share of own re-sources makes the company stable, and independent. With a low share, on the contrary, the company is unstable, market fluctuations and credit uncertainty can have serious consequences. However, foreign capital is cheaper, and too high indebtedness ratios can jeopardize the existence of enterprises. Purpose of the article: In general, the economic recession worsens the capital structure of enterprises, especially their debt management. Thus, the paper aims to apply the set of 13 indebtedness ratios to a sample of 779 Slovak and Czech enterprises from the construction sector to determine key microeconomic determinants that may influence the level of indebtedness. Methods: A non-parametric one-way analysis of variance ? the Kruskal-Wallis test ? was used to determine whether the set of indebtedness ratios is the same across countries, districts, and sizes. For analyzing the specific sample pair of stochastic dominance, the pairwise comparison was realized using the Dunn'stest with Bonferonni correction. The Mann-Whitney test was used to compare the differences in the set of indebtedness ratios between two independent groups of enterprises, based on their legal form and country. Findings & value added: The level of total indebtedness ratio and the self-financing ratio depends on the region as well as on the size of the enterprise and the legal form. In the case of credit indebtedness and debt-to-cash-flow indebted-ness, their dependence on the size of the enterprise and the legal form is obvious. The importance of the region and the legal form of enterprises, vice versa, affect the level of the financial independence ratio. These outputs are relevant for au-thorities, policy makers, or financial institutions to identify financial constraints that construction enterprises face and, as a result, make a long-term contribution to theory in this field.