Impact of macroeconomic factors on firm performance: Empirical evidence from India

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Understanding the macroeconomic factors is essential for all firms operating in the economy. Investment decisions, financing decisions, and risk management of firms are influenced by the existing macroeconomic factors, thereby impacting their performance. This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic factors on the performance of Indian manufacturing firms. Two-step generalized method of moments model is applied in this investigation to analyze the effect of firm performance from the financial year 2004-05 to 2021-22. Firm performance is proxied by two accounting-based measures and a market-based measure, namely, return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin’s Q, respectively, while the macro-economic factor is proxied by annual gross domestic product growth rate. The empirical findings show that firm performance has a positive relationship with macroeconomic factors. In addition, the findings reveal that firm size, firm age, leverage, sales growth, and operating profit impact firm performance. The study further extends to examine the moderating effect of financing constraints (measured by firm size and age) on macroeconomic factors and firm performance. The results show that the effect is more pronounced on small and young firms as compared to large and mature firms. The study also evaluates the impact of macroeconomic factors on firm performance excluding the crisis periods (the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic) and finds the impact on the market performance to be insignificant during non-crisis periods. This study recommends that lenders, managers, and other stakeholders should take proactive policy measures for any anticipated adverse changes in macroeconomic factors on the performance of Indian firms.

Acknowledgments
The financial and infrastructural support provided by FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India in completing this paper is gratefully acknowledged.

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    • Table 1. Definition of variables
    • Table 2. Descriptive statistics
    • Table 3. VIF
    • Table 4. Baseline regression
    • Table 5. Robustness test controlling ownership concentration and macroeconomic variables
    • Table 6. Large-size firms and small-size firms
    • Table 7. Mature firms and young firms
    • Table 8. Controlling crisis period
    • Data curation
      Gaurav Mitra
    • Formal Analysis
      Gaurav Mitra, Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Investigation
      Gaurav Mitra, Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Methodology
      Gaurav Mitra, Gaurav Gupta
    • Resources
      Gaurav Mitra, Vandana Gupta
    • Software
      Gaurav Mitra
    • Validation
      Gaurav Mitra, Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Writing – original draft
      Gaurav Mitra
    • Project administration
      Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Supervision
      Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Visualization
      Vandana Gupta
    • Writing – review & editing
      Vandana Gupta, Gaurav Gupta
    • Conceptualization
      Gaurav Gupta