Corporate Diversification and Internal Capital Markets: Evidence from the Turkish Business Groups

Abstract

We compare the performance of firms affiliated with diversified business groups with the performance of unaffiliated firms in an emerging market, Turkey. Our findings indicate that group affiliation improves firm's accounting performance, but not stock market performance. Furthermore, we find that firm's accounting (but not stock market) performance increases with the level of group diversification. Our results also indicate that having a group affiliated bank affects the accounting performance measures of the group firms positively, but the market value of the group affiliated firms negatively, supporting the misallocation of capital hypothesis. In addition, having a group affiliated media institution is found to affect the performance of the group firms positively. More importantly, we examine the frequency of seasoned equity issue offerings with the forms of cash (right and restricted right) issues and bonus issues to address the question of whether group affiliated firms create an internal capital market. We show that unaffiliated firms are more bound to external markets to raise capital while the affiliated firms use internal capital markets.

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