Debt financing and firm performance: an empirical study based on Swedish data

Darush Yazdanfar and Peter Öhman

Journal of Risk Finance, 2015, vol. 16, issue 1, 102-118

Abstract: Purpose - – The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between debt level and performance among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach - – Unlike the vast majority of previous research, this study uses three-stage least squares (3SLS) and fixed-effects models to analyse a comprehensive, cross-sectoral sample of 15,897 Swedish SMEs operating in five industry sectors during the 2009-2012 period. Findings - – This study confirms that debt ratios, in terms of trade credit, short-term debt and long-term debt, negatively affect firm performance in terms of profitability. As a high debt ratio seems to increase the agency costs and the risk of losing control of the firm, SME owners and managers tend to finance their businesses with equity capital to a fairly high degree. Practical implications - – As debt policy significantly influences firm performance, and thereby firm value and survival, SME owners and managers should focus on finding a satisfactory debt level. Originality/value - – To the authors’ best knowledge, this study is among the first to use 3SLS and fixed-effects models to analyse the relationship between debt level and firm performance. Moreover, while most previous research has examined listed firms, this study highlights the issue among SMEs, which play a fundamental role in the economy.

Keywords: Profitability; SMEs; Capital structure; Firm performance; Sweden; Debt policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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:jrf-06-2014-0085

DOI: 10.1108/JRF-06-2014-0085

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 ().