Purpose: The paper aims to investigate the dynamic relationship between working capital management and firm profitability for a sample of firms from eight European Union (EU) countries for the period 2006–2015.Design/methodology/approach: The panel regression model is used in the study. Firm profitability is measured using the return on assets (ROA) ratio, whilst cash conversation cycle, financial leverage, size, tangibility and cash flow ratio are used as independent variables. The novelty of this study is the use of cash flow ratio to develop the analysis firms by dividing them as healthy and nonhealthy.Findings: The paper reveals that working capital management affects firm profitability, and a positive relationship exists between them. The paper shows differences of working capital management and firm profitability across countries. The striking result of this study is that an inverted U-shape relationship exists between working capital management and firm profitability. Whereas the findings suggest that firms should be as close as possible to the optimal length of cash cycle to increase profitability, and managers should give a priority to working capital optimization.Originality/value: The authors consider results of this study relevant to both researchers and business policymakers in the field of working capital management policies.

This studys principal objective is to analyze the behavior of private investments in market economies in the New Emerging Economies (transition economies) in Eastern Europe. The main objective is to investigate the effect of public investment on private investments. Borrowing from neoclassical economics authors one expects to see a crowding out effect of public investment on private investments. The literature is divided and mixed at best at answering the question of what is the role of public investment in private investments. Our preliminary results show that while it can be true that there is a crowding out effect on private investment from public investments in the West, this is not the case looking at the East. There is a vast discussion on the effect of public investment on private investment at the firm level as well as aggregated at the country level. Among other factors recognized for such a discussion like uncertainty, imperfect competition, effectiveness, cost of capital that can bust or hinder private investment under the normal course of the countrys economy this study looks at another angle. Western countries are diverse in terms of the size of government. The new emerging market economies on the East are struggling to get their economies to compete with western countries which have inherited better public institutions, infrastructure, and market conditions overall. A pool of selected countries, unbalanced panel data analysis, in Eastern European continent is examined over a period of time 1991-2009. The data are obtained from World Development Indicators (World Bank data base, 2010). Using pooled cross sectional analysis, the data confirm the structural break of private investment behavior between developing and developed countries. This is due to lack of market economy institutions, infrastructure, performance of the economy, and expectations.

This study investigates the non-linear effect of the cash conversion cycle (CCC) on a firm’s profitability for a sample of 6072 firms from five countries (Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Italy) from 2006 to 2015. Additionally, this study explores the sensitivity of economic crises to the non-linear effect of the CCC on a firm’s performance. This study employs fixed-effects unbalanced panel data and weighted least squares (due to heteroscedasticity) to examine a firm’s performance, using return on assets (ROA) to measure profitability. The cash conversion cycle, financial leverage, size, and tangibility are independent variables. The results of this study show that the effect of the cash conversion cycle on firms’ performance is an inverted U-shape (non-linear). It also shows that the economic conditions vis-à-vis crises influence firm performance. This study found the optimal number of the CCC to be 90 days for the entire sample, 85 days for the non-crisis period, and 92 days for the crisis period. It also finds that the marginal effect of the CCC on ROA is 3.9 times higher during economic crises versus non-economic crisis periods. This study contributes to the existing working capital management literature by examining the non-linear effect of the cash conversion cycle on profitability and the sensitivity of these effects during economic crises. Thus, empirical evidence can serve scholars, business policymakers, and corporate finance professionals in managing their working capital strategically.