Influencia de la estructura de capital y el riesgo crediticio en la rentabilidad del sector financiero privado de Ecuador.

Abstract

The private financial sector is especially important in developing economies. Thus, the present investigation focused its attention on Ecuadorian private banking, establishing as a central objective the determination of the influence of capital structure and credit risk on the profitability of the private financial sector. The study was deductive, starting with essential theories such as the theory of the agent and the theory of capital structure of Modigliani and Miller and a wide literature review, which allowed the establishment of hypotheses and specification of the conceptual model. The investigation was quantitative of descriptive, correlational and explanatory scope with trans-longitudinal design. A Partial Least Squares PLS path modeling was used as the estimationn technique. Among the main findings, a significant negative effect of credit risk on bank profitability was found. While for the incidence of the capital structure, there was not enough evidence to prove it, revealing that banking institutions do not exercise significant actions on their capital structure in order to increase their profitability. Based on these results, the work proposes recommendations for future research and also a series of practical considerations for the sector studied.