The main objective of this paper is to analyze if the presence of important Brazilian institutional factors, such as the access to sources and different financing lines of credit, affects the economic and statistical significance of the information asymmetry, main assumption of the pecking order theory, in the determination of Brazilian firms' capital structure. In order to do so we used control variables, variables representing institutional factors and information asymmetry in a panel data regarding Brazilian firms in industrial sectors traded in Bovespa, in the period 1997-2007. The most important result found is that the variables size, tangibility, profitability and risk are important determinants of capital structure of the analyzed firms, also the significant participation of different lines in the indebtedness of these firms. In response to the objective of the research, it is observed that the information asymmetry does not lose economic and statistical significance in the proposed model, after inclusion of variables representing institutional factors, which highlights the importance of information asymmetry in determining the capital structure of Brazilian firms. The negative sign found supports the pecking order theory, where these companies would be less in debt due to the possibility of raising funds by issuing shares. It is emphasized that the proxies used to represent the attribute information asymmetry constitute a limitation of the research, being suggested, for future works, the use of other variables, to check consistency of the results found, as well as the analysis of the influence of information asymmetry on the cost of Brazilian firms' capital, in order to verify if companies considered with less information asymmetry can borrow resources at more attractive interest rate.
Capital structure; Pecking order theory; Information asymmetry; Institutional factors; Capital sources
