An Examination Of The Effects Of The February, 2001 Crisis (Turkey) On The Performances Of The Low-Q And High-Q Firms

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of the February 2001 Economic Crisis (Turkey) on the low-Q and high-Q firms. In the study, our sample is composed of the firms that are actively being traded on Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) during that time, and is divided into two sub-samples based on their Tobins’ Q values. As firms with high Tobins’ Q values are supposed to have lower debt levels we proposed them to be less affected by the crises: their debt repayment commitments are lower, although they are expected to be under the burden of higher interest rates. On the other hand, low-Q firms have incentives to overinvest due to the high levels of available free cash and they may be under the burden of some perquisites expenses. But because of the asset substitution affect, the investments undertaken by low-Q firms are expected to be safer projects while high-Q firms may have undertaken more risky projects. To test our hypothesis that the crisis would affect the low- and high-Q firms to differing extends, we construct the average mean excess returns of both sub-samples and use the Large Sample Test of Hypothesis About a Population Mean method. Our results mainly confirm our expectations: we found that the average mean excess negative returns of high-Q firms were higher than that of low-Q firms during the February 2001 Crisis, indicating that high-Q firms are more riskier in an economic crisis setting than low-Q firms, which in turn implies that the effects of the conflict between equityholders and debtholders dominate the affects of the conflict between managers and the shareholders.