Decomposing industry leverage: The special cases of real estate investment trusts and technology & hardware companies

Different industries exhibit significantly different leverage; companies in the real estate investment trust (REIT) and technology/hardware sectors are extreme examples. In the United States, the leverage ratio is twice as high for REITs (50%) as compared to non-real-estate firms (around 25%), and the technology/hardware sector has the lowest ratio (around 17%). We theoretically and empirically analyze their differences. By decomposing the difference into three channels, we find that the industry-specific channel explains around 67% for REITs and 68% for technology/hardware firms; the value-based channel is mostly responsible for the remaining portion. Taking the nonlinear influences of extreme values into account, the relevance of the industry-specific channel is considerably reduced.