Capital Allocation Across Industries - The Case of Hotel and Restaurants Sector and Energy Sector

We focus on capital allocation. The capital structure theories cannot explain how the capital is allocated. There are a quite big number of research showing that industry factors are important while trying to understand the financial decisions. We hypothesize that capital structure differ across industries, while financing fixed asset is similar in analyzed sectors. We compare the energy (production) sector (11 companies) and restaurants and hotels (service) sector (7 companies). We collected financial data for 2005-2015 period. Our analysis covers more 180 observation on financial data. The method applied is method of comparative analysis of the basic descriptive statistics (capital and asset structure, and the way the fixed assets are financed). We also applied significance U Mann Whitney test to identify any differences between analysed sectors. Our study does not confirms that capital structure differ across industries. Our study does not confirm that asset structure differ across industries, either. But financing fixed asset is not similar in analyzed sectors. They differ at the statistically significant level. The originality of our research is that we go far beyond the capital structure decisions to find out how the capital is allocated with regard to industry the company belongs to.