The impact of ownership structure on capital structure decision : empirical evidence from Vietnamese listed firms

This paper examines the relationships ownership structure and capital structure for non- financial listed firms in Vietnam during the period of 2007-2012 by using pooled OLS, random effect, fixed effect and GMM. More importantly, different from the other previous research using Vietnamese dataset, this paper is one of the first paper using GMM model to test for the relation between ownership structure and capital structure. Although different approaches are applied in this research, all results from those models are consistent. The research finds interesting evidence that while foreign ownership has negative impact on leverage, state ownership and managerial ownership have positive influence. This research makes some contributions in both theoretical and practical aspects. Firstly, the research identifies the relationship between many aspects of ownership structure and capital structure. Secondly, the data analysis process of this paper is conducted by different method to solve the problems arising when running regression and doing financial empirical results. Finally, the results of this paper emerge the suitable strategy to control firms and decide the optimal capital structure for different ownership structure.