What sources of finance constrain Vietnamese listed firms?

Abstract

This study is to investigate the sources of finance imposing the constraints on Vietnamese listed firms, after the introduction and rapid growth of the equity markets and the privatization wave that started since 1992. Using accounting data of listed firms on the Vietnamese stock markets, we find that listed firms are financially constrained with respect to both external funding sources, equity and long-term debt finance. Particularly, state-owned firms do exhibit higher sensitivity coefficients of equity than private firms, albeit with a non-statistically significant difference. For bank loan financing, we notice that large (HOSE listed) state-owned firms show a sensitivity that is three times the sensitivity of the private firms. The smaller HNX listed firms, however, show the reverse result, the private firms have a sensitivity coefficient that is twice as large as the one for the state-owned firms.