Impact of managerial ownership on capital structure: A survey of Turkish firms

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between insider ownership and capital structure decisions made by managers for an emerging market. Therefore, we survey managers of 103 firms listed in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). Our findings lend considerable support to our expectation that leverage, debt maturity and dividend issues reduce ability of managers to divert resources from value maximisation. However the same monitoring and disciplining tax is not observed for stock issues. Also, our findings document that managers of firms listed in the ISE do not opt to dividend smoothing policy. Finally, the results are in line with our expectation that, the more willing are the managers to reduce asymmetric information between them and shareholders, the higher their ownership level in firms.