Mendell, et al., (2006) investigates financing practices across firms in the forest products industry by studying the relationship between debt and taxes hypothesized in finance theory. In testing the theoretical relationship between taxes and capital structure for 20 publicly traded forest industry firms for the years 1994-2003, the study find a negative relationship between profitability and debt, a positive relationship between non-debt tax shields and debt, and a negative relationship between firm size and debt.
Abor (2005) seeks to investigate the relationship between capital structure and profitability of listed firms on the Ghana Stock Exchange and find a significantly positive relation between the ratio of short-term debt to total assets and ROE and negative relationship between the ratio of long-term debt to total assets and ROE.