Financial bubbles are characterized by a large increase in the economic growth on the market as a whole or in specific industries. The change gives rise to an increase in the capital needed to finance this growth. Companies typically have a choice between equity and debt capital to finance its business and the mix of these types of capital is often referred to as the company’s capital structure. There has been a lot of research done in the field of financial bubbles and of

capital structure, as of yet no studies seem to address these two areas in combination.

The aim of this study is to examine if financial bubbles affect a company’s capital structure and through this also examine if the supposed changes in capital structure can be generalized.

The study comprise of two identical time-series which examines the changes in leverage and the choice of financing during the Swedish real estate bubble in the early nineties and the IT-crash at the end of the 2000th century. The study examines changes in leverage, price-to-book ratio and the choice between issuing convertible debt versus issuing equity, of eleven real estate companies and twelve IT-companies respectively.

This paper shows that a company’s capital structure is indeed affected by a financial bubble though the way it is affected during different financial bubbles differs. Significant changes in leverage and the choice between different types of financial instruments are identified in both time-series. The study also shows that neither the Pecking Order Hypothesis as presented by Myers (1984) nor the traditional trade-off theory can in whole explain these changes. A significant difference in leverage between the two groups can be identified which is consistent with earlier empirical studies on the difference between capital structures in different industries.

The results in this study seem to indicate that the changes in capital structure can be explained either by a supposed disturbance in the cost of different types of capital during the financial bubble or by the assumption that companies in specific industries (as the IT-industry) do not have the possibility to chose the type of financing freely.