This study attempts to examine the role of working capital management components on four commons which are distinctive dimensions of business investment performance in Malaysia. The analysis covers 431 listed companies for the period 2000-2017 post the Asian financial crisis. The four performance indicators are return on assets (to proxy book return on overall business assets), return on equity (to proxy book return on shareholders’ fund), Tobin’s Q (to proxy firm valuation) and stock performance (to proxy real shareholder wealth). Our results indicate that working capital components of receivables collection period, inventory conversion period, payables deferral period, overall cash conversion cycle, current ratio, quick ratio, and cash ratio have generally exhibited important relationships with investment performance before and after the 2007-2008 subprime crisis. We would like to highlight the very robust negative effect of receivables collection period and cash conversion cycle. In addition, it is worth noting the distinctive roles of cash conversion cycle components and working capital liquidity ratios. While overly high liquidity position is usually viewed as inefficiency and detrimental for profitability, our panel data analysis consistently show that a high liquid position is favourable if the impact of cash conversion cycle is well considered. Hence, it is crucial for managers to prioritize the importance of working capital requirements to enhance the value of investors.

This article studies the impact of working capital management (WCM) on firm profitability (FP) in Vietnam. The study uses the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) regression method using a sample of 5,295 firms (observations) listed on stock market in Vietnam from 2009 to 2018. First, the study found that inventory turnover, average receivables (AR), average payment (AP), cash conversion cycle (CCC) had negative impacts on the firm profitability (FP). However, when we continued using quadratic function, we found that INV, AR, AP and CCC had a non-linear relationship (the U-curve) with FP. These research results contribute managerial contributions for firms in efficiently using capital when considering its investment policy.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effect of industry type on relationship between Tobin’s Q and working capital management among selected firms from Tehran Stock Exchange. The proposed study gathers the necessary financial information from 219 different firms over the period 2001-2011 and categorizes them based on different sectors. There are five independent variables including current ratio, the ratio of current assets to total assets, debt ratio, the ratio of current liabilities to total assets and total cash. Using a linear regression by considering type of industry as dummy variable, the study detects that there was a positive and meaningful relationship between working capital and Tobin-Q in various industries.