El comportamiento financiero de las cooperativas de trabajo asociado de Mondragon

Resum

This doctoral thesis studies the financial behaviour of worker cooperatives (WC) based on a mixed qualitative and quantitative research methodology. Traditionally, the literature has considered that this type of companies present difficulties to access external financing, due to issues and problems related to their legal, accounting and tax framework. Likewise, financial theories that try to explain financial structure decisions have been based, mostly on large capitalist companies. It is therefore important to analyse how WC fit into these contexts, and with that aim, a sample of MONDRAGON co-operatives have participated in the study. Thus, the financial dynamics of these companies have been analysed on the basis of several interviews with their financial managers and supplemented with the quantitative analysis carried out on the basis of MONDRAGON's economic-financial panel data. The results obtained show that these companies do not behave financially as differently as might be expected, although they do present relevant singularities that distinguish them from capitalist companies. These include a concern for the perceived limited ability to act regarding the solidity of their equity and financial diversification, and their motivations and preferences can be explained both through the predictions of trade-off theory (TOT) and pecking order theory (POT), specially the latter. In this sense, a separate analysis of debt maturity corroborates that the behaviour of short-term indebtedness is very similar to that of total indebtedness, while long-term indebtedness frequently inverse relationships related to the variables taken into consideration. However, the specific factors included in the analysis considering that the study focuses on WC companies seem not to be so decisive, although some significant relationships have been found.