Impact of Foreign Ownership on Leverage: A Study of Indian Firms

Capital structure choice is a corporate decision which provides a combination of securities used to finance the investment requirements (Myers, 2001). That the ownership of a firm influences its decision-making process is a well-accepted economic proposition. Due to liberalization and continuous measures initiated by the Indian government to make India more business-friendly, foreign ownership has assumed a prominence in many Indian firms. In this regard, this article aims to examine the impact of foreign ownership on the financing mix, employing the data of non-financial firms constituting the Nifty 200 index, for the period 2007-2018; the data have been extracted from Bloomberg (R) and Ace Equity (R). Using the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique for empirical analysis, the study observes that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between foreign ownership and leverage.