Capital Structure and Firm Performance: The Case of Central and Eastern European Economies

The current study examines the relationship between capital structure and firm performance for a sample of non-financial firms from eight Central and Eastern European countries in the period 2008 - 2017. Based on the agency costs hypothesis, we investigate whether debt ratio as a proxy for capital struc-ture has a positive relationship with firm performance for the countries included in the sample. The results indicate a negative relationship between these varia-bles and, thus, they did not support the agency costs hypothesis. In addition, we test the reverse causality from performance to capital structure based on two opposite hypotheses, that is, the efficiency-risk and the franchise-value hypo-thesis. The results support the franchise-value hypothesis, indicating a negative relationship between debt ratio and firm performance.