Beñat Herce Lezeta with Outstanding Grade in his Doctoral Thesis
Beñat Herce Lezeta with Outstanding Grade in his Doctoral Thesis
Beñat Herce Lezeta with Outstanding Grade in his Doctoral Thesis
On September 22nd, Thursday, the researcher and teacher Beñat Herce Lezeta defended his doctoral thesis with the qualification of outstanding
Title of the Thesis: The financial behavior of the worker cooperatives of Mondragon.
Court:
President: Dr. Alicia Mateos Ronco (Universitat Politècnica de València).
Secretary: Dr. Amaia Aguirre Aramburu (Fagor Taldea).
Member: Dr. José Luis González Pernía (University of Deusto).
Directors: Dr. Mónica Gago García (Mondragon Unibertsitatea - Enpresagintza) and Dr. Iñaki Arenaza Bengoa (Mondragon Unibertsitatea - Enpresagintza).
Abstract:
This thesis studies the financial behavior of worker cooperative societies (CTA) through a research with a mixed, qualitative and quantitative methodology. Traditionally, the literature has considered difficult the access to external financing for this type of companies, due to issues and problems related to their legal, accounting and fiscal framework. Likewise, financial theories that try to explain financial structure decisions have been based, for the most part, on large capitalist companies.
Therefore, it is important to analyze how CTAs fit into these contexts, for which a sample of MONDRAGON cooperatives has been used. Thus, the financial dynamics of these companies are studied on the basis of several interviews with their financial managers, complemented by the quantitative analysis carried out on the basis of MONDRAGON's economic-financial panel data.
The results obtained show that the financial behavior of these companies is not as different as might be expected, although they do present relevant singularities that distinguish them from capitalist companies. Among them we can cite the concern for the limited capacity for action that cooperatives assume to have on the soundness of equity and financial diversification, and that their motivations and preferences can be explained both through the predictions of tradeoff theory (TOT) and pecking order theory (POT), although more so for the latter. In this sense, the separate analysis of debt maturity corroborates that the behavior of short-term indebtedness is very similar to total indebtedness, while long-term indebtedness shows, in many cases, inverse relationships with respect to the variables considered. However, the specific factors introduced because the object of study is CTAs are not so decisive, although certain significant relationships have been found.