Capital Structure, Asset Efficiency, and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Transfer Pricing in Indonesian Consumer Sector Firms

Background: Financing, asset use and affiliated transactions may be associated with accounting profitability, but their relationships can depend on measurement and model specification. Objective: This study examines capital structure and asset efficiency in relation to firm performance and tests interactions with foreign related-party sales intensity. Methods: The reported balanced panel covers 160 Indonesian consumer cyclical and non-cyclical firms in 2023–2024 (320 firm-year observations). ROA is related to debt-to-asset ratio, total asset turnover and foreign related-party sales/equity through moderated regression, controlling for size and liquidity. Pooled, fixed-effects and random-effects estimates are compared. Results: In pooled estimates, TATO is positive (β = 0.0379; reported White p < .0001), whereas DAR is not significant (β = 0.0012; p = .8701). The TATO interaction is positive (β = 0.0761; p = .0027); the DAR interaction is not significant (β = 0.0428; p = .5027). Adjusted R² is 0.4377. Under fixed effects, DAR is significant (β = 0.0774; p = .0092), whereas the TATO interaction is not (β = −0.0349; p = .7191). Conclusion: TATO is the most consistently significant predictor across the reported models. The interaction is estimator-sensitive and cannot establish transfer-pricing effects or mispricing. Accounting overlap, selection and unresolved within-firm dependence limit interpretation; firm-clustered re-estimation is required.