Relationships between Debt, Growth Opportunities, and Firm Value: Empirical Evidence from the Indonesia Stock Exchange

The relationship between capital structure policy and firm value is interesting to study because the concept of capital structure was initiated by Modigliani and Miller who claimed that the company’s capital structure is not a factor in its value. They asserted that linking leverage with firm value was irrelevant. Therefore, this study examined the role of growth opportunities as a moderating variable for the relationship between capital structure and firm value. The population of this study is 300 companies from the manufacturing sector that are listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) for the period 2015-2018. To analyze the data, the subgroup moderation method was employed by dividing the data into two parts: companies with high growth opportunities and companies with low growth opportunities. The results revealed that capital structure had a direct positive effect on firm value. Furthermore, the test results of the two regression models of growth opportunities as the moderating variable are very interesting. It was found that for companies with high growth opportunities, the use of debt had a negative effect on firm value, and conversely, the use of debt had a positive effect on firm value for companies with low growth opportunities. The statistical F-test results proved that growth opportunities are a moderating variable for the relationship between capital structure and firm value.