because they neither increased nor decreased their debt-financing costs. Jang and Tang
(2009) indicated that a firm’s financial leverage has a direct inverted U-shaped
relationship with profitability and argued that financial, rather than business,
strategies are a more direct and efficient way to achieve higher profitability. They also
suggested that the maximum profitability, corresponding to optimal leverage, can be
inflated by increasing the level of international diversification. In other words, a firm
can increase the positive impact of the former by increasing the latter. Neither strategic
nor financial decisions can be mutually isolated to improve financial performance.
Chathoth and Olsen (2007a) showed that smaller firms report higher ROE than bigger
firms when economic risk is lower and market risk is higher than for the average firm,
given that the liquidity and debt ratio of such firms is lower than average. However,
Lee (2007) suggested that changes during specific economic periods do not reflect an
industry-wide practice for determining the capital structure of lodging firms.
O ¨
zer and Yamak (2000) examined the financial sources used by small hotels (less
than 100 rooms) in Istanbul. They showed that such firms use internal funds and debt
in their investment stage, and retained earnings at the operating stage. External debt
appears to be negligible; owners do not even consider bank loans due to the difficulty
of finding credit and the high costs of doing so. Also in the Turkish context, Karadeniz
et al. (2009) found that effective tax rates, tangibility of assets, and ROA are negatively
related to the debt ratio of lodging firms, while free cash flow, non-debt tax shields,
growth opportunities, net commercial credit position, and firm size have no
relationship with debt ratio. Neither the trade-off nor the pecking order theories seem to
explain the capital structure of Turkish lodging firms. Sharma (2007) showed that very
small hotels (about 25 rooms) in Tanzania obtain most of their funds through personal
sources or commercial banks. Their financing options are limited because they
normally lack the professionalism and collateral to obtain credit.
Financial leverage for single-family majority and minority firms will be different
depending on the ownership percentage of the primary owner. Financial leverage has a
positive relationship with the interaction between ownership percentage and
single-family majority/minority ownership, while family majority ownership is a
significant factor in explaining asset utilization (Kim et al., 2007). Canina and Carvell
(2008) reported that in terms of type of restaurant operations, owner-operators have
higher liquidity than franchisers, and can buffer more effectively between their
short-term financial obligations and their cash on hand to meet these obligations.
There exists little, if any, room for hospitality firms to develop or invent unique or
competitive capital structure tactics, compared to possible asset structure variations
(Andrew et al., 2007). Therefore, previous studies related to capital structure focused on
examining the consequences of different levels of capital structures. Jang and Tang
(2009) stated the importance of careful control of a firm’s financial leverage at an
optimal level. Although an optimal capital structure might, in theory, be reached by
establishing an equilibrium between the advantages (e.g. tax breaks) and
disadvantages (i.e. financial distress and bankruptcy-associated costs) of debt usage,
there are few empirical studies of this topic in hospitality firms. This could be an
interesting topic to explore, contributing to both the hospitality financial management
field and mainstream finance literature