FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE AND LEVERAGE STRUCTURE: A STUDY OF LISTED CONSTRUCTION FIRMS IN NIGERIA

The study examined how debt structure is shaping the financial performance of listed construction firms in Nigeria. Debt structure was measured with total debt to asset ratio, total debt to equity ratio and noncurrent debt to asset ratio while the proxy for financial performance was Return on Assets. Ex-Post Facto research design was deployed on a population of eight (8) construction companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) at the end of December 2021. Purposive sampling technique was deployed to select six (6) companies with complete financial reports over the review period as the sample size of the study. Secondary data were obtained from annual reports of the sampled firms from 2012 to 2021. In addition to the descriptive analysis, the Fixed Effect approach of Panel Least Square was used to carry out the regression analysis in the study. The findings include: total debt-to-asset ratio has a significant negative effect on the return on assets of quoted construction firms in Nigeria (β1 = -1.205775, p-value = 0.0000); the total debt-to-equity ratio has no significant negative effect on the return on assets of quoted construction firms in Nigeria (β2 = -0.001072, p-value = 0.0542); noncurrent debt to asset ratio has no significant negative effect on the return on assets of quoted construction firms in Nigeria (β3 = 0.078793, p-value = 0.4439). The study recommends that management should ensure that proper debt level is maintained to improve profitability and to ensure there are sufficient funds for business expansion.