Corporate Governance Feature on Capital Structure Decision of Vietnamese' firms

In the last decade, Corporate Governance has taken more important stage in corporate strategy. There have been numerous recent cases of malpractice where Enron and VW are examples of two major international ones. Financial pattern is closely linked to the corporate governance and it can have a major impact on the firms' performance, competitiveness and survival. Studies in corporate governance and financial pattern in developed country is challenging, but in developing country, it makes it even more challenging. Some of the works found the relationship between corporate governance, capital structure and firm's performance in Thailand. This paper looks at the Vietnamese firms. This research focuses on examining the impact of three important features of Board size, Managerial ownership and Return on assets on capital structure of Vietnamese firms. Positivist identified as the 'most appropriate' philosophy and the deduction was the best approach for this research. The regression test applied and it proposes that the above variables have significant impact on the capital structure decision of the firm. The results suggest that the larger is the board size, the higher is the debt equity ratio. The significant positive results of the managerial ownership also suggests if directors and relatives are shareholders then, there is more desire to borrow than sourcing through equity. The significant coefficient of return on assets indicates that the higher is the after tax profits on the total assets, companies prefer to reduce the borrowings.