Exploring resilience: The impact of operational efficiency and financial health in South African non-life insurance companies

The selection of financing is a top priority for businesses, particularly in short- and long-term investment decisions. Mixing debt and equity leads to decisions on the financial structure for businesses. This research analyzes the moderate position of company size and the interest rate in the capital structure over six years (2013–2018) for 29 listed Pakistani enterprises operating in the sugar market. This research employed static panel analysis and dynamic panel analysis on linear and nonlinear regression methods. The capital structure included debt to capital ratio, non-current liabilities, plus current liabilities to capital as a dependent variable. Independent variables were profitability, firm size, tangibility, Non-Debt Tax Shield, liquidity, and macroeconomic variables were exchange rates and interest rates. The investigation reported that profitability, firm size, and Non-Debt Tax Shield were significant and negative, while tangibility and interest rates significantly and positively affected debt to capital ratio. This means the sugar sector has greater financial leverage to manage the funding obligations for the better performance of firms. Therefore, the outcomes revealed that the moderators have an important influence on capital structure.

Academic resilience and emotional intelligence are considered important personal resources for furthering students’ academic performance. However, many educational organizations seem to trivialize the performance implications of these constructs in teachings and curriculum. Consequently, it can decrease not just their academic performance but also their employability, as they lack the generic competencies to adapt and survive in a stressful context. Even so, empirical evidence on integrating academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance remains unexplored in the Nigerian university context. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the linkages between academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance in Nigeria. The partial least square (PLS) modeling method was utilized for testing the stated hypotheses with data collected from 179 final year undergraduate students in the regular B.Sc. Business Administration and B.Sc. Marketing program at Delta State University, Nigeria. From the PLS results, the study reported that academic resilience was positively related to emotional intelligence (β = 0.125, p = 0.007), academic resilience (β = 0.231, p = 0.000) and emotional intelligence (β = 0.260, p = 0.000) were positively related to academic performance, and emotional resilience mediated the positive relationship between academic resilience and academic performance (β = 0.057, p = 0.005). While academic resilience predicted academic performance, it also predicted emotional intelligence, which affected academic performance significantly and positively.

This study aims to contribute to the emergence of the literature focusing on exploring the factors influencing the financing decision, as well as examining the relationship between the firm size, profitability and firm growth towards the corporate debt. Questions such as how relevant firm size, profitability and firm growth to debt are, quantitatively, had not been fully answered in the business literature. The purpose of this study is to fill this large gap by examining the role of the firm size, profitability, investment and firm growth for the corporate debt. This study tries to examine the determinants of debt in the financial literature which include size, growth, business risk, and profitability in accordance with the capital structure theory, in manufacturing firms in Indonesia. The sample contained financial data from 150 firms for the period 2012–2017. The results showed that the manufacturing firms in Indonesia had high debt levels, especially the size, profitability, firm growth and profitability had proven to be the debt determinants, which also confirmed the Pecking Order Theory. This study also found that the management preference of manufacturing firms in Indonesia for risk was the risk-seeker or risk-neutral ones. This finding implies that the choice of funding sources originating from debt still provided greater returns compared to the capital cost needed due to business uncertainties.