Revisiting the capital‐structure puzzle: UK evidence

Basil Al‐Najjar and Khaled Hussainey ()

Journal of Risk Finance, 2011, vol. 12, issue 4, 329-338

Abstract: Purpose - This paper seeks to explore the potential drivers of corporate capital structure. Design/methodology/approach - The paper applies both fixed effects panel models and random effects tobit models to examine this issue. A sample of 379 firms is used across the period from 1991 to 2002. Findings - It is found that corporate characteristics (firm size, firm risk, firm growth rate, firm profitability and asset tangibility) and corporate governance characteristics (board size and outside directorships) are the main drivers of capital structure of UK firms. In addition, the results show that changing the definition of capital structure may result in changing the sign and the significance of these potential drivers. Originality/value - The paper argues that another dimension of the capital structure puzzle can be introduced which is related to the definition of capital structure used in prior studies. It is worth noting that the aim of this paper is not to provide an optimal set of factors that may affect the decision of capital structure, but to highlight the effect of the different definitions of capital structure that can be used by different studies, which makes the comparison between such studies difficult or even erroneous.

Keywords: Capital structure; Corporate governance; United Kingdom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:jrfpps:15265941111158505

DOI: 10.1108/15265941111158505

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Risk Finance is currently edited by Nawazish Mirza

More articles in Journal of Risk Finance from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().