Capital structure and firm performance: the role of corporate governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether corporate governance has a mediating or moderating effect on the relationship between capital structure and firm performance. This study employs a quantitative method with a sample of 224 Italian non-financial listed firms from 2013-2017. Collected data were analysed using OLS and GMM estimations to test the research hypotheses and to assess the mediating and/or moderating effect of corporate governance. Based on an integrated theoretical framework that draws insights from agency theory, pecking order theory, and trade-off theory, our results are threefold. First, we find that capital structure has a negative and significant impact on firm performance. Second, we show a significant association between corporate governance mechanisms and firm performance. Specifically, we find that board size has a negative effect on firm performance, while board independence and managerial ownership has a positive effect on firm performance. Finally, our results indicate that corporate governance mechanisms do not mediate, but instead moderate the association between capital structure and firm performance. This study further suggests some important policy implications for both theory and practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".