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In this paper, we examine the importance of industry to firms’ real and financial decisions. We find that industry fixed effects explain far less of the variation in financial structure than do firm fixed effects. However, we find that industry-related factors other than industry fixed effects can explain part of this wide intra-industry variation in financial structure in competitive industries.
Our findings support the idea that industry factors affect not only individual firm decisions but also the joint distribution of real-side and financial characteristics within industries. We find that accounting for a firm’s position within its industry is important both economically and statistically. Our finding that own-firm financial structure depends on changes made by industry peers shows the importance of industry interdependence—even in competitive industries.
In competitive industries, we find that firms with capital–labor ratios close to the industry median (high natural hedge) use less financial leverage than firms that depart from the industry median capital–labor ratio (low natural hedge), as predicted by Maksimovic and Zechner (1991). We also find that real and financial variables are more dispersed in competitive industries, consistent with the intra-industry diversity pre- dicted in models of competitive-industry equilibrium.
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