PROFITABILITY AS A FUNCTION OF THE CASH GAP OF MEDIUM-SIZED AND LARGE ENTERPRISES IN CROATIA'S HOTEL INDUSTRY

The research problem is cash gap management and its impact on the profitability of medium and large enterprises in Croatia's hotel industry. The purpose of the paper is to investigate and determine profitability as a function of the mentioned enterprises' cash gap management. The hypothesis that profitability is a concave second-degree polynomial function of the cash gap of the enterprises in question is tested in the paper. Besides descriptive statistics, the dynamic panel data regression method is used in the analysis for the time horizon from 2017 to 2021. The research results show that enterprise profitability is a concave second-degree polynomial function of the cash gap. With regard to the profitability criterion, the results also indicate the existence of an optimal cash gap for all enterprises (48.82 days) and for medium-sized enterprises (52.37 days). Acknowledging the established concave quadratic relationship as well as mostly shorter than optimal cash gaps (94%) and low profitability, the existing strategies for cash gap management are assessed as too aggressive and inefficient. Therefore, to increase profitability, more conservative management is recommended. The study's contribution is the analysis of profitability as a second-degree polynomial function of the cash gap unlike most previous studies that researched the same as a linear function.