Kapitalstruktur i svenska exportintensiva branscher : En jämförande studie av noterade och onoterade företag under ekonomsk kris

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how the capital structure of Swedish companies in export-intensive industries changed in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic and to what extent established firm characteristics explain their financing decisions. The study draws on trade-off theory and pecking-order theory. The analysis is based on panel data covering 71,236 firm-year observations from 10,550 listed and unlisted companies operating within the manufacturing industry and selected parts of the service industries. The dataset was retrieved from Retriever Business for the period 2017–2024. Using a quantitative approach three multiple OLS regressions are estimated with total, short-term and long-term debt as dependent variables including fixed effects and firm clustered standard errors. The results show that profitability, size, tangible assets, growth and the crisis period all have statistically significant effects on at least one of the leverage measures, and all five null hypotheses are rejected. Leverage declined during the pandemic and the lower level largely persisted afterwards, particularly for total and long-term debt. A Chow-test confirms that listed and unlisted firms follow systematically different capital structure patterns. The pandemic effect is pronounced for unlisted firms but not statistically detectable for listed firms. The study contributes empirical evidence from an under-researched Swedish export context and indicates that trade-off theory and pecking-order theory are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, with their relative explanatory power depending on context.