Slack Resources, Corporate Performance, and COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from China

COVID-19 has caused tremendous damage to global economies, and similar health crises are expected to happen again. This study tests whether slack resources would enable companies to prepare for such uncertainties. Specifically, we explored the influence of the COVID-19 patient occurrence on corporate financial performance and the buffering effect of financial slacks using Chinese listed companies' data during 2021. We also examined whether this effect differs across firms' financial health and industry. Test results are as follows. First, consistent with the recent studies on pandemics, the degree of COVID-19 prevalence had a negative impact on the Chinese company's financial performance, and slack resources offset this adverse effect. Second, slack's buffering effects appeared mostly in financially constrained companies. Third, such effects mostly appeared in industries vulnerable to the COVID-19 shock. In the business environment of 2021, adapted to COVID-19, our main test result seems to mainly come from companies with a greater need for slack. Our tests imply that, despite differences in the degree of accessibility to resources, excess resources help companies overcome the COVID-19 crisis, which means that firms can more efficiently respond to economic shocks such as COVID-19 if they reserve past profits as free resources. This study contributes to the literature in that there is limited research on the slack resources' buffering effect on the COVID-19 shock and that this study works as a robustness test as it uses data from one of the East Asian regions at a time when the control of COVID-19 was relatively consistent and successful, which can limit the effect of COVID-19 and slacks.