Impact of profit retention on value creation to shareholders of Brazilian companies

Abstract

The company's decision on reinvesting profits started from the premise that the return on invested capital will exceed the opportunity cost, creating, consequently, shareholder value. Thus, wealth generation of the entity will be influenced by the level of retained earnings. Therefore, in this work we seek to examine how retained profit affect the value creation of 223 Brazilian companies, from 2008 to 2014, the control used was investment opportunity. Therefore we used descriptive statistics and panel data models. As main results we found that there is a high level of retained profit in the sample, however, a small part of the companies created value in the period. Still, the negative relationship between the level of capitalization of profits and created value is highlighted. Besides, it was observed that the companies that belonged to groups of higher levels of profit distribution ended up generating more wealth for investors.