G31 - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies; CapacityReturn

A number of indicators can be assessed for a company’s financial health, with indebtedness indicators being one of the important ones. The formation of the financial structure is influenced by a huge number of factors. The subject of this research is the indebtedness of companies in the Transportation and storage industry. The companies come from the V4 countries, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Romania, between 2010 and 2018. In total 25,246 companies are analysed according to their size for medium and large companies. The aim of the research is to find out whether profitability, liquidity, asset structure, non-debt tax shield, GDP growth rate, reference interest rate, and inflation rate affect the level of total, long-term and short-term debt. The main finding is that corporate debt is significantly affected (measured by the value of coefficients) by non-corporate determinants and specifically the development of the reference interest rate. However, if we look at the most numerous determinants, it is profitability. Companies in the selected industry should focus primarily on the various forecasts within the external environment of the company and include them in their analyses when financing their activities.

Asset pricing in its essence is a very controversial topic. Despite numerous research papers criticising traditional approaches, such as linear factor models, practitioners as well as academics repeatedly return to the milestone models such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), mainly due to their attractive simplicity. This article focuses on the risk-return relationship by comparing the power of traditional and alternative asset pricing models in explaining the cross-section of asset returns. The focus is on unconditional models, commonly used among investors and equity analysts. This paper is based on the research performed by Estrada in 2004 and it extends his approach by introducing the use of GMM. The results suggest that for Emerging markets' investors should give preference to total risk measures over systematic risk measures. Within the category of systematic risk measures, downside beta proved its superiority to traditional CAPM beta. The results can be attributed to delayed integration process, partially justified by the lower FDI and portfolio investments into Emerging markets.

The paper deals with payment discipline in the building industry in the Czech Republic. The aim of this paper is to identify, compare and evaluate the financial situation of building companies with different payment practices in the Czech Republic in the period 2010 - 2014. The paper uses enterprise and statistical methods. The payment discipline of companies is expressed by a payment index, which is constructed by Bisnode. The results are based on analysis of 1374 companies which are operated in the building industry. The analysis shows that payment habits increase with higher index IN05, Taffler's model, index IN99 and with larger size of the firms. Payment habits of building companies are very good. However, about 2 % of solvent companies have poor payments habits.