Abstract :
Capital structure describes a mix of long-term debt capital and equity capital employed by a company to fund its operation and finance its assts. The objective of the study is to identify the determinants of the capital structure and examine whether each of the determinants have significant impact on capital structure. A sample of 25 beverage food and tobacco sector firms listed on Colombo Stock exchange(CSE) in Sri Lanka over the period of 2016 to 2020 were considered for the study. The independent variables such as profitability (PROR), firm size (FMSZ), tangibility (TANR) and liquidity (LIQR) and dependant variable such as long term debt ratio (LTDR), short term debt ratio (STDR) were used to measure the leverage level of the firms. The data were analysed and hypotheses were tested through regression analysis and correlation analysis by use of SPSS. Coefficient of regression used to identify the significant impact of each determinant against the endogenous factors. The investigation empirical findings reveals that firm size, tangibility and liquidity have significant negative impact on leverage level (STDR), while profitability has positive insignificant impact on leverage level (SDTR). On the other hand all four element have insignificant relationship with LTDR.
Keyword :
profitability, firm size, tangibility, liquidity, long term debt ratio, short term debt ratio.