Investigating the Relationship between Financial Leverage and the Criteria for Measuring the Performance of Food and Pharmaceutical Companies Listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange by Data Envelopment Analysis

Financing decisions or capital structure is one of the main decisions of financial management due to influencing the risk and the return of Shareholders. Therefore, determining the optimal capital structure is one of the most important issues which the managers of economic agencies encounter in the process of financial decisions.
This is an applied research and it uses the quasi–experimental design and the prospective approach. In order to test the hypotheses and identifying the output variables of Data Envelopment Analysis, Pearson Correlation test has been used. The statistical population of the research include the food and Pharmaceutical companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2008–2014. In this research, SPSS Software Version 19 and Frontier Analyst Software Version 3 have been used.
There is a significant relationship between the current ratio variables, the ratio of the operational earnings to sale, the return of assets, economic value added, market value added, and the ratio of price to earnings per share with financial leverage. But, there is not any significant relationship between the quick ratio and the ration of market price to the book value per share with financial leverage. According to the existence of the mentioned significant relationship between financial leverage and the criteria for measuring performance, financial leverage has been selected as the input variable and the criteria for measuring performance as the output variables in Data Envelopment Analysis technique, then by the application of the variable return to scale Data Envelopment Analysis Model, the optimal capital structure for the companies has been selected.
The results of the research state that the food and Pharmaceutical companies which have similar efficiency, have used their debt instrument and investment instrument more effectively. This has caused companies to have a better performance. In the other words, these companies have used their accessible different financial resources more effectively and optimally than the other companies.