Leverage and Financial Performance of Tunisian Quoted Firms: A Narrative Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59971/meta-journal.v3i5.380Keywords:
Leverage, Financial Performance, Tunisian Quoted Firms, Debt Maturity, Narrative ReviewAbstract
This narrative review examines how leverage affects the financial performance of Tunisian quoted firms, emphasizing evidence from the last five years and outcomes such as profitability, valuation, liquidity, solvency, and stability. The central finding is that recent evidence is fragmented and does not support a universal leverage effect: some Tunisia-related banking studies suggest that debt-to-assets or solvency may support profitability, while other studies associate leverage with weaker resilience, higher instability, or poorer outcomes under uncertainty. A major result is evidentiary absence: the 2020–2025 corpus contains few direct Tunisia-specific studies on quoted non-financial firms estimating leverage effects on ROA, ROE, or Tobin's Q, so the literature is stronger for banks than for non-financial listed companies. Debt maturity is conceptually important, yet recent Tunisian listed-firm studies do not provide direct short-term versus long-term debt coefficient comparisons for core performance measures. Taken together, the findings suggest that leverage–performance effects in Tunisia are context-sensitive and are likely shaped by firm size, ownership type, sector, governance conditions, and macro-political uncertainty rather than by leverage alone.
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