<![CDATA[Purpose – This study examines how tangible investment, intangible assets (proxied by acquisition goodwill), cash holdings, and economic conditions shape capital structure among intangible-intensive, non-banking Indonesian firms, testing whether the Pecking Order Hypothesis (POH) or Trade-off Theory (TOT) better explains the profitability channel, and whether over- and under-leveraged firm-years differ in their determinants.Methods – Using pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) with firm-clustered standard errors in a partial-adjustment framework, the study analyzes 375 firm-year observations (75 firms) from technology, healthcare, and food and beverage firms on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, 2020-2024. Cash holdings and the debt tax shield are separate regressors, economic condition is a continuous real GDP index (2019=100), and firm-years are classified over- or under-leveraged (LO/LU) via a leave-one-firm-out benchmark and a firm-clustered bootstrap, corroborated by GMM and two robustness checks.Findings – Previous debt, tangible investment, and the GDP index significantly increase leverage, while profitability significantly reduces it, consistent with POH; cash, the tax shield, and goodwill show no significant association. The investment-by-GDP-index interaction is significant and negative, and LO and LU groups differ significantly only in debt ratio, apart from a marginal food-and-beverage tax-shield difference.Research implications – Because goodwill alone did not capture the intangible-leverage link, future studies should test other proxies and larger samples able to test heterogeneity formally.Originality – This study treats goodwill as an explicit determinant, separates cash from the tax shield, and replaces an independent-samples comparison with a firm-clustered bootstrap for the LO/LU comparison, not previously documented in this market.]]>
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