IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ujbmxx/v60y2022i3p704-733.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Performance, working capital management, and the liability of smallness: A question of opportunity costs?

Author

Listed:
  • Vivien Lefebvre

Abstract

This article studies the relationship between working capital management and firm operating performance and focuses on the moderating effect of size. We use a large sample of 56,221 small, medium, and large firms from France, Germany, and Italy, and our results indicate that the impact of working capital management on performance strongly depends on size. We identify a higher sensitivity of performance to underinvestment in net operating working capital for small firms, but no higher sensitivity to overinvestment. These findings suggest that small firms experience high opportunity costs from lost sales when their net operating working capital is low. Financial constraints and lack of financial management are discussed as potential explanations because both are expressions of the liability of smallness.

Suggested Citation

  • Vivien Lefebvre, 2022. "Performance, working capital management, and the liability of smallness: A question of opportunity costs?," Journal of Small Business Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 60(3), pages 704-733, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ujbmxx:v:60:y:2022:i:3:p:704-733
    DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2020.1735252
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00472778.2020.1735252
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00472778.2020.1735252?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vivien Lefebvre, 2023. "Trade credit, payment duration, and SMEs’ growth in the European Union," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 1313-1340, September.
    2. Umar Farooq & Mosab I. Tabash & Ahmad A. Al-Naimi & Linda Nalini Daniel & Mohammad Ahmad Al-Omari, 2023. "Herding Trend in Working Capital Management Practices: Evidence from the Non-Financial Sector of Pakistan," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 16(2), pages 1-14, February.
    3. Carla Costa & Rui Baptista, 2023. "Knowledge inheritance and performance of spinouts," Eurasian Business Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 13(1), pages 29-55, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ujbmxx:v:60:y:2022:i:3:p:704-733. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ujbm .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.