Equity return on family and non-family firms : evidence from property industry in Malaysia / Aida Nor Shamira Ahmad

The study investigates the relationship between equity return of family firms and nonfamily firms specifically on property firms in Malaysia. This study uses sampled panel data restricted to property companies listed on Bursa Malaysia from 2006 to 2015. The dependent variable involve in this study is return on equity (ROE) while short-term debt ratio (STD), long-term debt ratio (LTD) and total debt ratio (TD) act as the independent variables. The study uses leverage measures as the proxies for capital structure and return on equity (ROE) as the proxy for firm's profitability. The family and non-family firms chosen are based on the same industry which is property industry in order to make the result comparable. There were 5 family firms and 5 non-family firms. The company was selected based on its three criteria which are market capitalization which is more than RM400 million, year of establishment which is more than 20 years and the availability of data from 2006 to 2015. The financial data was obtained from the DataStream. By analyzing with the 10 years observation from 2006 to 2015, the results from this study is significantly related to the return on equity of the selected property companies in Malaysia. The findings suggest that for family firms, short-term debt, long-term debt and total debt have significant relationship with return on equity while for non-family firms, leverage have no significant relationship with the profitability.