In corporate finance literature it is well known that how a firm chooses its capital structure depends on its growth opportunity and profitability among many financial and economic variables. According to Fama and French (2002), both growth opportunity and profitability are the main reasons for financing deficits, and the capital structure decisions by firms are closely related to these two variables. There are many competing finance theories or hypotheses that try to explain the relationships between firm's capital structure and financial and economic variables such as trade-off theory, agency theory, simple pecking order theory, complex pecking order theory, market timing theory and hold-up hypothesis. In this paper, we consider all of the above capital structure theories and hypotheses and test which theories or hypotheses are confirmed and which are not for Korean listed manufacturing companies. In particular, we examine how growth opportunity faced by Korean listed manufacturing firms may affect their choice of capital structure and which capital structure theory best explains financial decision making behaviors of Korean listed manufacturing firms. We extract our data using KISVALUE supplied by National Information and Credit Evaluation (NICE). The sample of our paper consists of 601 Korean manufacturing companies listed both on Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) and on Kosdaq from the period of 2000 to 2010. Based on the sample, we performed panel data analyses. The empirical implications are as follows: First, growth opportunity measured by market-to-book value ratio has a statistically significant positive relationship with book leverage, which is consistent with the simple pecking order theory. However, growth opportunity has a statistically significant negative relationship with market leverage, which is in line with the trade-off theory and/or the complex pecking order theory. According to Fama and French (2002), in the complex pecking order theory, firms are concerned with future as well as current financing costs. Balancing current and future costs, it is possible that firms with large growth opportunities maintain low-risk debt capacity to avoid either foregoing future investments or financing them with new risky securities. Second, we divide the sample into three groups according to the magnitude of their growth opportunity and find the same relationship for all groups as before, which is different from prior studies (Chen and Zhao, 2006; Serrasqueiro and Nunes, 2010), but that the highest growth opportunity firms are least sensitive to debt ratio compared to their lower growth opportunity peers. Moreover, our result seems to suggest that Korean listed manufacturing companies with the highest growth opportunity recognize their financial distress risk higher in the respect that they show low profitability compared to the firms of other countries. In general, it is more effective for the high growth opportunity firms to use more debt financing because they show high profitability and low borrowing cost on average. Third, the simple pecking order theory tested by financing deficit variable is not confirmed because the relationship between debt ratio and financing deficit is significantly positive only for the lowest growth opportunity firms (the other groups have significantly negative coefficients). Furthermore, the simple pecking order theory tested by profitability variable is confirmed because both market and book leverage shows significantly negative relations with profitability. The trade-off theory tested by asset tangibility and firm size variables is confirmed because both market and book leverage shows statistically significant positive relations with them. Also, the trade-off theory tested by bigshare dummy variable is confirmed because it shows a significantly negative relationship with debt ratio, which suggests that the higher the major shareholders' ownership firms have, the lower the firms' debt ratios are. Fourth, to test whether the market timing theory is confirmed for Korean listed manufacturing firms, we look at the relationship between debt ratio and external finance weighted average market-to-book ratio. The result depends on whether we use market leverage or book leverage as a dependent variable. We find a significantly positive relationship for book leverage and a significantly negative relationship for market leverage, which suggests that the market timing theory holds only for market leverage in case of Korean listed manufacturing firms. Finally, growth opportunity has a statistically significant negative relationship with bank loan, reinforcing the hold-up hypothesis which claims that firms with high growth opportunity are concerned that their firm-specific information may be monopolized and utilized by banks. According to the grouping analysis based on the magnitude of growth opportunity, the highest growth opportunity firms show a significantly negative relationship between growth opportunity and bank loan, but the lowest growth opportunity firms show a statistically insignificant relationship between them. This seems to suggest that the more growth opportunity firms have, the less preferable are bank loans for them.