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Record W4414106900 · doi:10.1016/j.irfa.2025.104596

Capital allocation efficiency of SMEs: Global evidence

2025· article· en· W4414106900 on OpenAlexafffund
Liang Ma, Xiaowen Zhang

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Review of Financial Analysis · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicCorporate Finance and Governance
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersXi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool UniversityUniversity of Alberta
KeywordsCapital allocation lineInvestment (military)Capital marketFinancial marketCapital (architecture)Cash flowCapital market imperfectionsFinancial capital

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Leveraging a comprehensive cross-country dataset, this study systematically examines whether and how small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) differ from large firms regarding capital allocation efficiency, which is an essential matter of economic efficiency. We find that SMEs exhibit significantly lower investment responsiveness to growth opportunities compared to large firms. This divergence is not driven by the differences in growth opportunities, cash flows or external dependence between small and large public firms. While we did not find evidence suggesting larger financial market size enhances SMEs’ capital allocation efficiency, we documented that a more informative financial market substantially improves SMEs’ investment sensitivity to growth opportunities. These findings provide important global policy insights specifically relevant for enhancing SMEs’ efficiency and growth.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.344
Threshold uncertainty score0.375

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.004
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.265 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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