Dinâmica das operações de capital de giro para médias e grandes empresas durante a pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about the need for social isolation to contain the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus and led to a significant reduction in economy activity in 2020. Different public policies were adopted that year with the aim of relieving cash flow needs and keeping businesses afloat during the crisis. The literature shows increasing banks’ liquidity is beneficial during crises. Some studies argue that bank relationship is a factor to maintain credit supply. This paper studies whether two measures adopted in Brazil, the temporary financial operations tax (IOF, for its acronym in Portuguese) exemption and the Working Capital Program for Firm Preservation (CGPE, for its acronym in Portuguese), are related to the evolution of the number of working capital loans granted by one of Brazil’s largest financial institutions and whether there was any difference between clients with and without bank relationship. The study builds on the financial institution’s proprietary dataset that includes the number of working capital loans granted to large and medium firms by their type (relationship borrower or not) in the period spanning from March 2019 to December 2020. Based on time series analysis, the results indicate a significant increase in the number of loans in the final week of the IOF exemption and in the final week of the CGPE. These findings suggest that firms have delayed their credit taking until the last moment when these more favorable conditions would be available. However, this does not mean that the impact of these measures over their entire duration was null, because we cannot see what the demand for credit would have been otherwise. There is no evidence of changes in the proportion of working capital for clients with and without relationship in the period. This result suggests that the degree of bank relationship was not a preponderant factor in the granting of working capital loans to medium and large firms in the financial institution during the crisis.