Firm’s Characteristics, Capital Structure and Financial Performance of Energy Utility Companies in Nigeria

This study examined the moderating effect of firm size and age on the relationship between debt capital and financial performance of Listed Energy utility Firms in Nigeria for the period of five years (2019-2023). Short term Debt, Long Term debt and Total debt proxied debt capital while Return on Assets proxied financial performance. Firm size and age served as moderating variable. The study adopted ex-post facto research design and inferential statistics. Robust Fixed effect Models and Drisc/Kraay Standard Error were used in analyzing the data. Primary findings revealed that short-term debt, long-term debt and total debt have negative significant effect on return on assets. However, the secondary findings have revealed that moderated firm size and age on the total -term-debt has positive insignificant effect on return on assets while moderated-long-term-debt and moderated-total-debt have positive significant effect on return on assets. The moderation R-Squared was 0.901 while the primary R-Squared was 0.554. That means, firm size and age has moderated debt by 0.860. In view of the findings, this study concludes that firm size and age has great moderating effect on debt capital. Therefore, this study recommends that investors should consider firm size and age as an effective variable in making investment and financial decision. Secondly, management of companies should consider firm size and age in determining the debt to be collected.