Abstract. This paper briefly tries to define the fundamentals underlying capital structure theories and evaluates whether some a priori assumed macroeconomic determinants can be related to the leverage parameters of interest examined in the paper. For this purpose, we conduct an empirical research that covers 90 selected firms traded on the BSE Stock Exchange. For the empirical analysis panel data methodology has been applied. The study period is 2002-2009 Our main results reveal that there is a negative and statistically significant relationship between non-debt tax shields and size and debt and there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between growth and ratio of fixed assets to total assets debt.

Keywords: debt, dynamic panel estimators, static panel models, capital structure, BSE stock exchange.