Enterprise characteristics, capital structure and operational performance: The case of listed enterprises in Vietnam

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between enterprise characteristics, capital structure and operational performance among a sample of 592 companies listed on the Vietnamese stock exchange during the three years 2012-2014. Whilst most previous studies in this area have used multiple regression as the main method of analysis, the paper follows the examples of Titman and Wessels (1988) and Chang et al. (2009) and adopts a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. Specifically, path analysis was employed to analyze simultaneous relationships among the various variables. The results suggest that for listed enterprises in Vietnam, operational performance has a negative effect on both of the measures of capital structure considered, namely long-term debt/total assets ratio (LDR) and short-term debt/total assets ratio (SDR), while the extent of state ownership has a positive effect on LDR and enterprise age has a positive effect on SDR only. The ratio of long-run to total assets affects the two capital structure measures in opposite ways: the effect is positive on LDR and negative on SDR. The evidence was considered to be inconclusive on the question of direction of causality between operational performance and LDR.