Different industries exhibit significantly different leverage – companies in the REIT and technology/hardware sectors are extreme examples. The leverage ratio is twice as high with 50% for REITs as for non-real estate firms with around 25% in the U.S.; whereas the technology/hardware sector has the lowest ratio with around 17%. We theoretically and em­pirically analyse their differences. By decomposing the difference into three channels, we find that the industry-specific channel explains around 67% for REITs and 68% for technology/hard­ware firms; the value-based channel is mostly responsible for the remaining part. When taking non-linear influences of extreme values into account, the relevance of the industry-specific channel is considerably reduced.