Thus, the aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we provide evidence
relating to the determinants of capital structure of South African firms. Second, we
look at how the 2007/2008 financial crisis impacted on these firm-level determinants.
Thus, we examine whether determinants of capital structure derived in the western
context are applicable to the context of South Africa and whether the recent financial
crisis impacted on these determinants. Using panel econometric techniques, we base
our analysis on firm-level data obtained from 202 firms in South Africa and this
represents a new setting for extending the knowledge of financial crisis beyond the
boundaries of the developed economies. Our intuition is that firm-specific factors that
account for variation in leverage in the developed economies are also applicable in the
South African context and that the 2007/2008 financial crisis did impact on the capital
structure decisions of firms. Our study yields some noteworthy results that are in line
with previous studies. First, the results demonstrate that some of the theories of capital
structure underpinning debt-equity choice of firms in developed economies are also
applicable in the South African context. Particularly, we find support for both the
pecking order and the trade-off theories.
Second, while the global financial crisis of 2007/2008 led to many economic
hardships, it has also paved a way to examine the role of firm-specific factors in capital
structure decisions when firms are financially constrained, due to the financial crisis.
The study advances the current literature on capital structure by explicitly examining
the effects of the recent financial crisis on the determinants of capital structure.
Therefore, as an additional contribution of this paper, we find a strong evidence of
the effects of the financial crisis on the capital structure of firms in South Africa.
The role of profitability (PRO), volatility (VOL), tangibility (TAN) and non-debt tax