Threshold Effect of the Number of Bank Relationships on the Tunisian Firm Performance

The aim of this paper is to define the optimal number of bank relations and to investigate its impact on the performance of some Tunisian firms. To achieve these goals, we used a sample of 36 Tunisian listed companies over the period 2008-2015 and we performed the Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) as econometric approach. Empirical results show that the optimal number of bank relationship for Tunisian listed companies is 3.222. Findings indicate that within this optimal number, bank-firm relationships exert a positive and significant effect on the performance of the Tunisian listed companies. For macroeconomic factors, results show that the Growth rate of Gross domestic Product (GDPG) increases significantly the firm performance; however, the effect of inflation is negative but not significant.