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Lean management is getting more and more attention in today's highly competitive environment. In this context, the aim of this study is to test the hypothesis that efficient (lean) inventory management leads to an improvement in a firm's financial performance.

Data for the analysis came from the ICAP database, which contains financial information on all medium to large Greek firms. The sample period extended from 2000 to 2002. For each year all manufacturing firms with the corporate form of societés anonyms operating in any one of the three representative industrial sectors in Greece: food, textiles and chemicals were selected.

Preliminary results, obtained by cross‐section linear regressions, reveal that the higher the level of inventories preserved (departing from lean operations) by a firm, the lower its rate of returns. Findings are additionally tested by the use of pseudo‐likelihood ratio test which constitutes a more reliable tool, thus verifying the robustness of the linearity of the relationship.

Given the great number of the possible determinants of performance it is difficult to isolate the effect of inventories even by using large samples and advanced methodologies.

Since the results from other empirical studies on the microeconomic determinants and consequences of inventories are somewhat contradictory, this study sheds more light to this issue by employing more sophisticated statistical tests applied to a large and recent sample of Greek manufacturers across different industries.

The purpose of this study is to examine the transmission of volatility between business confidence index and stock market indices in Greece. The country remains the riskiest project in European Union (EU) and previous studies fail to reach an accurate conclusion regarding the direction of this transmission.

The study covers the period from January 2013 to August 2022 in monthly basis where important economic events occur. Considering that these economic events derive strong volatility moments, the authors adopt a new methodology that measures the transmission of volatility with higher precision. This is the generalized spillover analysis by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012).

The results indicate that Business Confidence Index (BCI) is the main receiver of volatility spillovers in Greece under all aspects of the used methodology. The specificity of the results shows that business activity through a green growth model is what drives investor confidence and then their activities.

Although a handful of studies have considered the transmission of volatility between BCI and stock market indices, this study contributes in several ways. This study focuses on one country (Greece), avoiding the dispersion of the results from the examination of the relationship in several countries. The used country remains the riskiest project in EU even nowadays, while other studies fail to confirm the main direction of volatility spillovers from business confidence to stock returns. This study covers a period that is ignored by previous studies and includes important economic events. In addition, considering that these economic events derive strong volatility moments, a new methodology is adopted in this field of research that measures the transmission of volatility with higher accuracy.