The Existence of Optimal Capital Structure: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

According to CSRC's industry classification standard, indicating capital structure with total debt, short-term debt and natural debt to total assets ratio simultaneously, this paper analyses the characteristic of capital structure of Chinese listed companies with multivariate analysis of variance. Results show that there is statistically significant difference among the capital structure of different categories, even among different sub-categories in the category of manufacturing, the difference of capital structure is also significant. Thus, there exist optimal capital structure with Chinese listed companies and industry is one of the most important determinant factors. In addition, companies in China tend to rely more heavily on short-term than long-term debt in their capital structure.