Comparative Investigation of Capital Structure in High-Tech and Traditional Companies Using Artificial Neural Network and Multiple Regression Analysis

Choosing between debt financing and capital financing influenced by internal and external factors impacting companie's capital structure. The main goal of determining capital structure is to recognize the combination of financial resources to maximize stockholder's wealth. Because of the qualitative aspects of capital formation in high-tech companies, there has been huge investments in these companies which doesn’t seem to be a rational behavior in the investment community; Therefore it seems necessary to compare high-tech and traditional company’s capital structure. In this paper, in order to investigate the capital structure of high-tech and traditional companies and also comparing linear and non-linear models, companies are divided into two groups, high-tech and traditional companies. We collected year-company data of 378 companies during 2004- 2009 for the analysis using multiple regression and artificial neural network. The findings of this study indicate that liability ratio and financial leverage decisions in two above mentioned companies are different. The capital structure criterion in both industries has significantly different and non-linear models of capital structure in comparison with linear ones are more powerful in prediction.