Determinación de la estructura de capital para las empresas de la industria manufacturera del Ecuador durante el periodo 2015-2019

Investment and financing decisions have motivated the financial area to focus its studies on the analysis of company’s capital structures, so that such decisions are the most appropriate for investors. As a result, companies work with a defined capital structure that is not necessarily optimal. The objective of the present study is to determine the capital structure with which big manufacturing companies in Ecuador are managed during the period 2015-2019, for this purpose a review of the published literature on capital structure of companies and the theories developed that explain their behavior was carried out. For its analysis, information from 228 large companies in the manufacturing sector was used, and as a dependent variable the debt ratio disaggregated into total debt, short and long-term debt, in addition to explanatory variables such as profitability, tangibility, liquidity, size and growth opportunities that were analyzed under the methodology through the panel data structure, using the fixed effects model. The results were compared with the predictions of the most influential theories that are those of the trade-off and pecking order, and that after carrying out the statistical and theoretical significance tests it was possible to establish that in the analyzed sector the assertions of the peckíng order theory, becoming the theory that best fits when making capital structure decisions in large manufacturing companies in Ecuador