Management Over-Confidence, Internal Financing and Investment Efficiency

One of the most important decisions managers should take and one of the crucial components of every business unit operation is financing. Managers have the control over choosing the resource of financing and compared with external financing, internal financing is much easier for them. Choosing the optimal financing policy by managers plays an important role in risk and wealth creation for shareholders. Manager’s over confidence is an important behavioual characteristic that affect the way managers invest, finance and decide on dividend policies. Managers prefer internal financing over external financing because they have more control on internal resources and then, when this is combined with risk-taking behavior of  over confident managers they can affect the investment efficiency since they may stray from the optimal level of investment. On the other hand, if managers feel that corporate governance mechanisms constraint them or they have insufficient internal resources for investing, they may be reluctant to invest. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between management over-confidence, internal financing and investment efficiency.

This is an applied reseach and it is a quasi-emprical research and its methodology is  post-event research. This research investigates the real data of firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) and because of that its results are generalizable to the research population. In this research we have used systematic elimination method to chose the research sample. In order to test the research hypothesis, time priod of 2012 to 2018 were chosen and the multivariate regression model by combined data method was used obtain the results. Data from 188 firms were analyzed and we used Microsoft Excel and Eviews version 9 to analyze the data and extract research results.

The results of testing research hypotheses show that there is a negative significant relationship between internal financing and investment efficiency. It can be said that the benefits of internal financing has decreased the efficiency of firms’ investment, an example of this benefits is the availability of internal resources. This availability cause managers to violate the optimum level of investment (over-invest or under-invest in projects). Also, there is a negative relationship between internal financing and over-investment and a positive relation between internal financing and under-investment. Putting into another words, in firms with under-investment, the level of internal financing is higher and the amount of external resources for financing decreases. So, the internal financing is one of the reasons we have under-investment in firms. In addition, taking together the effects of management over confidence and internal financing, investment efficiency decreases. This results are consistent with research theoretical literature. In contrast to internal financing, external financing creates some limitations for managers and because of that managers are reluctant to finance through external resources. So, this is why the revel of investment strays form its optimum level. This results are in line with He et al (2019), Taghizade Khanqah & Badavar Nahandi (2020) and Faraji et al (2019).

Internal financing is a factor that affect under-investment positively. So, based on managers control over internal resources and their concern about valuation of their firm by market, it is evident that they prefer to face minimally with control mechanisms and external regulation. In addition, it can be said that, it is not always for the best interest of firm and its shareholders to have a high degree of internal financing. Therefore stockholders should consider this in their analysis. Putting constraints on the level of internal financing (based on its effect on the level of investment by managers) by stake holders can affect the return of firm considerably. Also, the relationship between use of internal financing and the level of investment by managers and their over-confidence may be a two-way relationship. With an increase in the use of internal financing and the decreasion of over-investment and increasion of under-investment, the predicted income of projects and the firm in total may be decreased, that in this case the over-confidence of managers will in turn decrease again.