BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

Purpose – The interest paid on own capital can benefit companies in the Brazilian capital market as it can be considered a business expense and is, therefore, deductible as a corporate tax. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of interest on equity (IOE) on capital structure decisions.

Design/methodology/approach – The initial sample consisted of 524 publicly traded companies from different industries in the Brazilian capital market that were listed on Bovespa. Companies in the finance, insurance and funds industries were excluded from the sample due to the unique features of these financial intermediaries. Some companies in the initial sample were excluded due to a lack of published data, inactivity during the sample period, etc. Thus, the paper excluded those companies that did not have valid observations or failed to publish them. The final sample included 370 companies and covered the nine-year period from 1998 through 2006.

Findings – To this end, the authors identified the main determinants of capital structure and analyzed, through panel data, the relationship of IOE in addition to other determinants of capital structure, such as size, profitability, investment opportunities, risk, sales growth, real interest rate and real exchange rate, in corporate debt. The novel contribution of this study is the inclusion and analysis of the IOE in studies on the determination of capital structure of Brazilian companies. A new capital structure scenario was created when Law No. 9.249/95 required changes in legislation, ceasing the restatement of balance sheets and allowing companies to compensate their stockholders through IOE. Before this change, companies could only benefit from the tax benefits of debt, using debt capital. Now, they can also benefit from the use of equity because, by requiting equity through the IOE, deductions of income tax and social contributions on net income are allowed by tax law because the IOE may be considered a financial expense.

Originality/value: The authors were not able to find any other publication of a similar study in a review of the extant empirical literature.

The present study investigates whether listed Brazilian companies between 1995 and 2008 coordinated cash and debt policies for effects of hedging against underinvestment under conditions of financial constraint. The results indicate the absence of a hedging component when simultaneously using cash and debt policies in constrained firms. For firms with financial constraints there was positive sensitivity of cash to cash flow and negative sensitivity of debt to cash flow, regardless of the need for hedging. The unconstrained firms did not present statistically significant sensitivity of cash to cash flow, but presented negative sensitivity of debt to cash flow, results that were also independent of the need for hedging. These findings run counter to those of Acharya, Almeida & Campello (2007) in the American market, where cash and negative debt were found to play different roles in intertemporal optimization of investments among constrained firms, according to the need for hedging.