DETERMINANTS OF THE CAPITAL STRUCTURE OF BRAZILIAN COMPANIES: A PANEL DATA ANALYSIS

Objective: To identify and analyze the intrinsic factors of companies and the macroeconomic factors in Brazil that influence the capital structure of publicly traded companies. Fundamentals: Trade-off, pecking order and agency cost theories. Method: Econometric panel data technique for a sample of 284 Brazilian companies listed in B3. Results: The data analysis showed that the determinants of capital structure in this study are the intrinsic variables: financial cycle, asset value, tangibility, general and immediate liquidity, growth opportunity, asset and equity turnover, EBIT margin, ROA, ROE, ROIC; and macroeconomic variables: GDP growth and taxes. Contributions: This study aims at contributing to the discussion that is still inconclusive about the determinants of the capital structure and regarding the previous studies that did not use the financial cycle variable. The present research proposed to add this factor to the studied model, which proved to be positively correlated with the indebtedness level.