We examine whether the public availability of product market incumbents' financial disclosures leads to greater capital structure mimicking of incumbents by entrants. Exploiting a change in disclosure enforcement for German private firms in the mid-2000s, we find entrant-incumbent mimicking rises substantially in concentrated markets once incumbents' financial statements are publicly available. Additional tests exploring potential mechanisms are more consistent with interfirm learning underlying the effect than alternative channels. Our findings shed light on the effects of competitor financial statement disclosure on private firms’ initial financing decisions and highlight how capital structure dependencies among peer firms arise.

我们研究了产品市场上现有企业的财务信息的公开可用性是否会导致新进入者模仿现有企业的更大资本结构。利用2000年代中期德国私营公司的披露执行方面的变化，我们发现，一旦公开了现任公司的财务报表，就可以在集中市场上模仿现任公司/现任公司的人数大幅度上升。探究潜在机制的其他测试与企业间学习相比，与潜在的渠道更相符，而不是其他渠道。我们的研究结果揭示了竞争对手的财务报表披露对私营公司初始融资决策的影响，并强调了同行公司之间资本结构依存关系的产生方式。