EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The relationship between diversification and firm's performance. Is there really a causal relationships?

Federico Marinelli
Additional contact information
Federico Marinelli: CUNEF

No D/907, IESE Research Papers from IESE Business School

Abstract: Firm's boundaries have been one of the central questions in several research domains, but it is possible to affirm that a definitive consensus has not been reached to determine the relationship between diversification and firm's performance. We study this relationship according to the main empirical finding in strategy and finance but controlling for the persistence of abnormal returns. Through longitudinal studies, using both accounting and market indicators, we conclude that this relationship is not causal but attributable to factors other than the degree of relatedness among business units and the degree of efficiency of the internal capital market. The persistence of abnormal returns has a grater explanatory power: we find that some diversified firms persistently create shareholder value, beat the market index and have lower market volatility, while others persistently reach opposite results. Moreover, we find that higher performance is associated with an unrelated portfolio of business segments.

Keywords: diversification; abnormal return persistence; shareholder value and risk; efficient internal capital market; business segment relatedness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2011-02-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iese.edu/research/pdfs/DI-0907-E.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:iesewp:d-0907

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IESE Research Papers from IESE Business School IESE Business School, Av Pearson 21, 08034 Barcelona, SPAIN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Noelia Romero ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-02
Handle: RePEc:ebg:iesewp:d-0907