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In the context of financial digitization, fintech collaboration with external enterprises is progressively emerging as a pivotal way for commercial banks to accumulate specialized talent, overcome technological challenges, and enhance profitability. Meanwhile, banks also face numerous formidable challenges such as implementation difficulties and low conversion efficiency. This paper explores the impact of fintech collaborations on the profitability of commercial banks in China. The results show that the fintech strategic collaboration between commercial banks and enterprises significantly enhances the profitability of commercial banks, which is achieved by innovation capacity and business familiarity. The effect is more prominent for commercial banks in the period of banking slump, with larger size, and those without fintech subsidiaries. Additionally, there exists a nonlinear relationship in the impact, and broader collaboration may yield a diminished positive effect. The findings of this paper will provide reference for the debate on the effect of fintech on bank profitability.

In this paper, we study the endogenous formation of a joint lab in an oligopolistic market. We compare the situation where N firms choose their R&D efforts non-cooperatively and the situation where a subset of firms conduct their R&D through a partial joint lab. We show that the profits of the firms joining a lab increase with its size until a certain critical size. Beyond this critical size, the profits of the players decrease with the growth of the dimension of the lab. An important result yields that the socially optimum size of the lab is lower than the equilibrium size when the output spillover levels are sufficiently low such as applied research. The policy implications to this result suggest the intervention of public authorities to prohibit firms to form the grand joint lab or partial cooperations that can emerge spontaneously but are detrimental to social welfare through the strengthening of antitrust laws.

This paper reports on a comparative quasi-experiment of how perceptions of entrepreneurial growth strategies differ between students, managers and technology entrepreneurs. The differences in perceptions as to what critical factors drive three strategies: no growth, market share growth and annual profit growth across to stages: start-up and take-off are measured. The ranks of the critical success factors are the dependent measures and the strategies and the phases the independent variables. Results show that experience impacts the ability to distinguish between strategies. Results also show that the perceptions of the critical success factors significantly differ between the groups. Hence even experience will yield quite different cognitive maps.

Achieving uninterrupted production, increasing profitability and productivity, protection against stock-outs, and improving customer service levels have been the major benefits of holding inventory. Maintaining inventory levels beyond a certain limit is, however, an undesirable phenomenon. While practitioners and researchers are aiming at minimum possible cost of inventory, many small business owners in India still fail to appreciate fully the true costs of carrying inventory. In this context the present study examines a case of the lock manufacturing industry in the Aligarh district of the state Uttar Pradesh. The investigations reveal that lock manufacturing units, by-and-large, are either unaware of even the fundamental techniques of inventory management or do not practice them for one reason or the other. The case attempts to illustrate how SMEs can reduce their inventory costs, and hence improve profitability, through the application of basic models of inventory management.

This paper reports the results of an investigation of the effect of Working Capital Management (WCM) practices on profitability of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), from the perspective of financial directors. Specifically, I look at their WCM target level practices, WCM alteration frequency and WCM strategy practices. The analyses are based on questionnaire distributed to 248 AIM listed SMEs. The paper employs OLS regression on responses from 72 managers of AIM listed SMEs. The results show that the WCM practices of AIM listed SMEs managers have an effect on profitability. However, the results show that given the limited resources of SMEs, the main focus of managers should be on the setting of specific target level for WCM so as to increase profitability.

The terms reliability, warranty and insurance are interwoven in some ways. The warranty of system and insurance coverage offered by the manufacturer or third party reflects its potential reliability. In certain situations, the insurance may expire before the warranty time. To address this issue, the reliability and sensitivity analysis of a single-unit insured system has been carried out. The system may functions in warranty period with or without insurance cover whereas no insurance cover is given during nonwarranty period. If faults are covered under warranty or the insurance terms, the manufacturer or insurance company is liable to pay all the repair/replacement costs; otherwise, the user must pay the entire cost. The reliability metrics of the system and factors impacting system profitability are derived using Markov and regenerative processes. Profit equations and sensitivity functions are established for all stakeholders. The sensitivity function for system availability is also derived for all the possible considered periods. Exponential distribution is used to illustrate the developed model numerically.

In this study, we intended to examine empirically how a firm's profitability performance would impact its growth process and the inference for Gibrat's Law. The basic study looks at small, medium and large firms' tendency to grow when their internally generated profits are high. The sample is 124 construction companies listed from years 2003 to 2010 at BURSA Malaysia. Data used is secondary data collected from BURSA Malaysia and annual reports. The result indicated that "growth" contributed significantly to profitability in both small and medium-sized construction companies, but was not significant in large companies. Thus, hypothesis two was supported. This study supports Gibrat's Law, showing that size and growth rate are independent.

This paper investigates the impact of Asian banks' income structure on competitiveness, profitability, and risk over the period 2005–2011. Exchange-listed commercial banks of eight Asian countries are included in the study sample. The cross-sectional regression results reveal that higher exposure of net non-interest income in Asian banks increases market risk and asset risk but lowers insolvency risk, ROA and ROE. On the other hand, higher exposure of net fees and commissions reduces return volatility, market risk, and asset risk but increases insolvency risk, ROA, and ROE. Further, exposure to trading and derivatives, along with other securities, tends to decrease banks' competitiveness.

This paper examines the relationship between liquidity and profitability of the non-financial firms listed in Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) for the period of 1998–2013. Pedroni and Johansen co-integration results show that liquidity, profitability, firm size and long-term debt (LTD) have significant co-integration relationship in the long run. The causality test results expose that a strong bidirectional casual relationship exist among the variables of liquidity and profitability, LTD and liquidity profitability and firm size in the short run. Also, there exists unidirectional causality among the variables of firm size and liquidity, profitability and LTD in the short run. Furthermore, Pooled Mean Group results show that profitability, firm size and LTD have long-run co-integration relationship with liquidity. However, in the short run, profitability and LTD significantly contribute to the liquidity and the error correction mechanism shows that speed of adjustment to equilibrium is significant within the year. Impulse response analysis indicates shocks in the firm size, LTD and profitability have positive and significant impact on liquidity.

This paper examines relative performance of alternative asset pricing models using individual security returns. The standard multivariate test used in studies comparing the performance of asset pricing models requires the number of stocks to be less than the number of time series observations, which requires grouping stocks into portfolios. This results in a loss of disaggregate stock information. We apply a different statistical test to overcome this problem and to investigate relative performance of alternative asset pricing models using individual security returns instead of portfolio returns. Our findings suggest that a parsimonious six-factor model that includes the momentum and orthogonal value factors outperforms all other models based on a number of measures as well as the average $F$-test. Unlike the standard multivariate test, we find that the average $F$-test has superior power to discriminate among competing models and does not reject all tested models.

An extensive, in-depth study of risk factors seems to be of crucial importance in the research of the financial market in order to prevent (or reduce) the chance of developing this return. It represents market anomalies. This study confirms that the $q$-factors model is better than the other traditional asset pricing models in explaining individual stock return in the US over the 2000–2017 period. The main focus of data analysis is, on the use of models, to discover and understand the relationships between different factors of risk market anomaly. Recently, Fama and French presented a five-factor model that captures the size, value, profitability, and investment patterns in average stock market returns better than their three-factor model presented previously in 1993. This paper explores a shred of new empirical evidence to assess the asset pricing model through an extension of Fama and French model and a report on applying Bayesian Network (BN) modeling to discover the relationships across different risk factor. Furthermore, the induced BN was used to make inference taking into account sensibility and the application of BN tools has led to the discovery of several direct and indirect relationships between different parameters. For this reason, we introduce additional factors that are related to behavioral finance such as investor’s sentiment to describe a behavior return, confidence index, and herding. It is worth noting that there is an interaction between these various factors, which implies that it is interesting to incorporate them into the model to give more effectiveness to the performance of the stock market return. Moreover, the implemented BN was used to make inferences, i.e., to predict new scenarios when different information was introduced.

A procedure confirms whether a return-factor correlation is anomalous or results from endogenous simultaneous-equations bias. The identification strategy sorts the cost of capital components for instruments. In the first stage, the initially found factors are regressed on cost instruments. In the second stage, a confirmed anomaly has predicted value significant in returns and exogenous.

Taxes, depreciation and capital structure are strong instruments, affecting 1980–2017 quarterly U.S. stock returns. Size, value and profitability decisions are significant in instruments. Returns increase in fitted profits, but not small size. Actual and predicted values have weaker correlation with returns over time.

The book-to-market ratio’s numerator adds assets and liabilities differing in risk. We propose a test for the value premium and its sources. Individual balance sheet holdings are divided by firm size. When associated risk premium coefficients are equal, an overall book-to-market is appropriate. Otherwise, there are different risks in assets and liabilities.

For U.S. firms, for four decades since 1980, the excess return is regressed on seven ratios relative to size for cash, receivables, tangibles, intangibles, payables, short and long-term debt, and controls. The seven value premiums are not equal. Firms earn higher returns for cash and receivables and lower for short-term debt. Tangible and intangible assets earn no value premium.

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between profitability and leverage ratios using a sample of Taiwan-listed firms. Like the U.S. evidence, we do find such a negative profitability-leverage relationship for the full sample. Although the profitability effect is still negative for passive firms that do not issue any security, it is positive for firms that issue both equity and debt but do not invest in fixed assets. Furthermore, while the dual issuers without investment adjust their leverages toward their targets the fastest, passive firms do so the slowest. Overall, our results on the profitability effect on leverage are consistent with the dynamic trade-off hypothesis that accounts for costly adjustments.

This paper examines the performance of the Chinese corporations listed in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, using data from the financial statements and IPO databases. We find that the latest state owned enterprise's (SOE) reforms have been successful in the sense that profitability increased and financial structure improved comparing with other ownership firms. But the restructuring of business failure firms does not seem to be successful. This phenomenon implies that government policies or action measures and infrastructure mechanisms of corporate restructuring are not properly established, especially for failed firms.

Failure among SMEs has been attributed to size, age, location and being part of particular industries and not part of a network. These determinants, if used as surrogates for resources, suggest firms that lack such resources are more susceptible to failure. Using the resource-based view of the firm, this paper aims to do a post-mortem examination on the attributes of failed SMEs by analyzing data of more than 13,000 failed firms in the UK between 1999 and 2009. The findings reveal that failure is not merely a function of lack of resources. Although these findings shed new light on attributes of failed SMEs, there are still some limitations to the work that must be taken into consideration when applying the results.

In most developing countries, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are an essential segment of the economic composition and crucial players for fostering innovation, growth and prosperity. Despite wide agreement among researchers in entrepreneurship and SME management that entrepreneurial and general self-efficacy can positively impact business formation and growth, one aspect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, i.e., financial self-efficacy, has not been linked to SME performance in terms of SME profitability and growth, or satisfaction of the entrepreneur with their company. This study fills this research gap by uncovering new knowledge about the relationship between the financial self-efficacy of the entrepreneur and elements of SME performance. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire in one European country. Hypotheses were conceptually developed and checked using regression analysis. The results of this research reveal new knowledge about the relationship between financial self-efficacy and performance. The entrepreneur’s financial self-efficacy can matter for the profitability of SMEs, as well as for the growth and satisfaction of micro-SMEs and certain differently defined groups of entrepreneurs or companies.

This paper explores links between developed innovations and business performance in small enterprises with fewer than 50 employees. It also examines how performance has changed over time during a period of five years. The empirical evidence is based on two quantitative datasets describing innovation and business performance in 145 small enterprises in 2005–2009. The study makes a contribution to academic literature by providing a detailed view of the differences in performance across innovation types. The results suggest that during the period of five years, non-innovators have been the best performing enterprises in terms of operating earnings and return on investments while radical innovations can be connected with sales growth. During the recession, the less vulnerable enterprises have been non-innovators and innovators characterised by the high diversity of developed innovations. Applying these results helps small business owners to consider what is the nature and timescale for getting return on innovations.

The main objective of this paper is to study the impact of capital structure and capital ownership form of SOEs after equitization. We have considered all 137 state-owned companies after equitization for which data can be collected during the period from 2007 to 2017. These encompass companies in different industries listed on the HOSE (Ho Chi Minh City) and HNX (Hanoi) stock exchanges. To this end, we have applied REM and FEM models and corrected for variance with the GLS and FEM models. Our findings reveal that the variable leverage (LEV) has a negative impact on ROA, but, interestingly, has a positive impact on ROE and Tobin’s Q. Growth rate (GROWTH) have a positive effect on both ROA and Tobin’s Q. State ownership (SO) has only positive impact on ROA. Meanwhile, the company size variable (SIZE) has a positive impact on Tobin’s Q. In addition, in relation to our examination of how the domestic and foreign resources might impact on the profitability ratio, we have observed that the domestic equity ratio has a positive impact on both ROA and ROE whereas the foreign ownership ratio has a negative impact on both ROA and ROE.

The paper examines the determinants of profitability of real estate companies by using panel data of Vietnamese listed companies on the Hanoi stock exchange (HNX) and Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange (HOSE) from 2007 to 2020. Profitability ratios are measured by return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). The results indicate that the cost on revenue ratio, debt-to-equity ratio and the crisis and COVID-19 pandemic are negatively correlated with firm profitability. Meanwhile, the sales to current assets ratio, money supply growth rate and economic growth rate (GDPG) provide a positive correlation with profitability. We find that firm size and equity to total assets have positive effects on ROA, while there is a negative relationship between equity to total assets and ROE, and not enough evidence to conclude how firm size affects ROE. The study thereby provides suggestions and recommendations for the administrators of the government, real estate companies and investors in Vietnam.