Corporate Governance on Capital Structure Decisions: Evidence from Listed Non-financial Companies in Sri Lanka – Quantile Regression Approach

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to discuss about how corporate governance has an impact on the capital structure decisions. The focus of this empirical study emphasis on the top 100 market capitalization non-financial companies as at 31st December 2018 in CSE for 2012- 2018-year period. Quantile regression analysis is used to determine the relationship between corporate governance variables such as, CEO duality, Board size, Number of committees, Board balance, and gender diversity on capital structure decisions of the listed non-financial companies. Due to non-normal distribution of data which was identified using higher variance in kurtosis and skewness created a disadvantage of using OLS model which shows the results conditional to the mean. Therefore, quantile regression method was used in order to determine the above mentioned objective in an accurate manner. The results indicate that, gender diversity has significant negative relationship and board committees have statistically significant positive relationship to different levels of capital structure. Board size, board balance, CEO duality, doesn’t have significant impact on different levels of capital structure decisions. The interpretation of the results and the reasons for such variations were identified.