Capital Structure and Bank Performance: Empirical Evidence from Bangladesh

The paper empirically investigates the relationship between capital structure and the performance of listed banks in Bangladesh using panel data over the period of five years from 2014-2018. To estimate the association between leverage level and bank performance the Panel Corrected Standard Error (PCSE) model is used in this study and the findings indicate that long term debt has a positive influence on the performance of banks which is measured in terms of ROA and ROE. This implies that long term debts are associated with the higher performance of banks listed in Bangladesh. The regression results also reveal that the capital structure component of total debt has no statistically significant impact on ROA, ROE and EPS but it has a significant positive impact on the performance of banks measured by price earning ratio. Furthermore, this analysis finds no relationship of long term debt and total debt with the EPS. These findings lead to conclude that capital structure has a weak to no influence on the performance of listed banks in Bangladesh. This paper is the first research attempt that investigates the impact of capital structure on the performance of all banks listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange in Bangladesh.