Analysis of the Role of Corporate Governance on Listed Firm’s Capital Structure: The East African Stock Markets Perspective

Abstract

This paper examine the role of corporate governance on listed firm’s capital structure decisions in developing economies, East African stock markets. To achieve the objective of this paper, we used a strongly balanced panel dataset of 320 observations (i.e. a sample of 32 non-financial listed firms in East African region from 2006-2015. Measures for capital structure decisions were short term debt ratio (STDR),long term debt ratio (LTDR) and total debt ratio (TDR) as dependent variables and explanatory (independent) variable was corporate governance practices measured by researcher-constructed index consisting of 28 corporate governance provisions ;thus the corporate governance practices index (CGPI). Furthermore, the effects of control variable such as firm size (SIZ), the level of economic development (GDP) and industry dummies were also examined. The panel corrected standard errors (PCSEs) regression model was employed for corporate governance practices and capital structure decisions to analyze the data. Our results indicate a statistically significant negative effect of corporate governance practices on capital structure decisions at 5% significance level. Our paper contributes to both literature and the practical implications, because our paper provides a first insight of the corporate governance practices and its effects on capital structure decisions for the East African regional stock markets. The paper recommends to securities markets regulatory authorities in East African region such as East African member states securities regulatory authority (EASRA) and their respective countries securities markets regulatory authorities to stimulates new efforts towards better corporate governance practices to listed firms in the regional bloc due to its statistically significant effects on capital structure decisions and future study can be extended after considering external corporate governance mechanisms.