In this article, we investigate whether the capital structure moderates the corporate governance–firm performance nexus of Vietnamese firms. This study uses data from state-owned joint-stock companies to test the proposed hypotheses in two phases. In the first phase, we adopted and adapted the corporate governance quality (CGQ) index for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) nations to design a questionnaire to evaluate the CGQ of state-owned joint-stock companies. In the second phase, we collected information from the company’s reports to assess CGQ, cross-check the data and finalise our evaluation. Then regression models were run to test two proposed hypotheses. Empirical findings show that CGQ exerts a positive impact on Vietnamese state-owned joint-stock companies’ performance. Moreover, our result confirms that firms’ capital structure moderates the CGQ–firm performance nexus. Our study implies that the government should promulgate legal frameworks and policies to establish superior legal infrastructure to build trust for investors and improve CGQ in state-owned enterprises.
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