Impact of Short-Term Management on Portuguese and Spanish Firms' Performance

An effective and efficient working capital management ensures companies a greater ability to survive in an increasingly competitive and challenging business world and therefore plays a key role in the manager's operational and financial decisions. Thus, the main objective of this chapter is to show empirically the extent to which working capital management influences the measures of business performance evaluation. To achieve the proposed objective, the ROA, ROE, and Tobin's Q were used as measures of performance. For this study, data from Portuguese and Spanish companies were used, which are listed on Euronext Lisbon and the Madrid Stock Exchange, respectively, resulting in a final sample of 106 companies. The methodology used to test the hypotheses formulated was dynamic panel data methodology (with GMM system) for a period between 2010 and 2016. The results obtained in this research show, in a general way, that there are significant differences in the determinants of performance depending on the samples used, whether they are the Spanish Sample or the Portuguese Sample.