**1. Introduction**

The first decade of the 21st century has undergone major changes in the recession and boom periods. These cycles in the economy have had an important impact on the value of the company. Seeing as how an enterprise is also evaluated from the point of view of investments, both those of the past and those of the future, and in order to support these investments, it is essential to choose a financial mix. The financial decision depends on the dynamics of the business environment, whether it is in a period of growth or decrease. When a financial crisis occurs, the creditors dictate their preferred method of financing to companies. If a manager searches for capital, he should be aware of the preferences of investors and precisely respond to the conservative behavior of creditors, because they face a big dilemma, to invest or not. The firm's manager should understand their dilemma and try to attract the confidence of the investors through the firm-specific features. The effects of the Euro Crisis resulted significantly negatively related to leverage in the study of Moradi and Paulet (2019). During the financial crisis, firms which are vulnerable to the shocks in the financial markets absorb the negative impact earlier than other firms. Hence, financial difficulties can lead to bankruptcy and can be the result of wrong decisions in choosing the financial structure. The financial structure is the result of some decisions that managers take in order to support long-term investments, identifying appropriate sources of financing to contribute to the optimal development of the company. Investments were affected after the economic crisis in 2008 in different ways, depending on firm's debt structure and whether firms had access to the public debt market. Iwaki (2019) found that accessibility to the public debt market, as well as, the differences in debt structures have an important influence in investment. The author underlined the fact that bank-dependent firms faced more underinvestment after crisis

than firms with access to public debt market. Thus, the capital structure is a fundamental element of the organization. Financial resources can be divided into two broad categories, namely, equity and debt, and the financial structure can be defined as a merger between the two, more precisely, a ratio in which they are allocated. An optimal combination of these results in a reduction in the price of capital.

The empirical literature highlighted the effects of firm-specific and country-specific factors on firm leverage, such as size, growth, asset tangibility, profitability, tax shields, liquidity, earnings volatility and interest rate, inflation rate, gross domestic product etc. Capital structure decisions are affected by the firm's own characteristics and country characteristics. Previous research demonstrated that the effects of capital structure determinants are not equal across countries. Ramli et al. (2019) emphasized that the impact of firm-specific factors and country-specific differ in terms of significance, sign and intensity level in Malaysia and Indonesia. Industry-specific factors have also a contribution to capital structure decisions. Li and Islam (2019) showed that industry-specific factors can both directly and indirectly affect the capital structure choice. In terms of direct impacts, the authors showed that GDP significantly influences the capital structure. In terms of indirect impacts, their findings showed that companies tend to be more leveraged, if they operate in economically significant industries.

It is important to study which factors have an influence on the financial structure, as this in turn has an influence on the economic performance of the company. Identifying an optimal financial structure is relevant to reduce risk and increase performance. An imbalance in loans and their ability to generate financial efficiency can lead to bankruptcy. Therefore, it is vital to have a balanced report on the use of equity and borrowed capital as sources of financing, but also to know the factors and their influence in order to make a precise delimitation of the proportions. The database consists of 51 companies from the technology industry listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The companies in this sector are constantly evolving and they contribute to the change of human culture and it seems relevant to study which factors have an influence on financial structure of these companies. The studied period of time 2005–2018 is also relevant because it includes the recession period as well as the post-recession period, when the companies had to take important financial decisions in order to survive in front of the crisis

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses the existing theories and related literature. Section 3 presents the database, selected variables and quantitative techniques. Section 4 reveals the empirical findings. The last section concludes the study.
