To understand the appropriate capital structure for healthcare firms, a two-stage approach to predict the use of long-term debt can provide valuable insight into the determinants of leverage. Business risk (BR) in tandem with other determinants of capital structure does improve predictive power in a two-part econometric model. However, because of the frequency of not-for-profit(NFP) entities in the Healthcare Sector, an approximation of BR was developed and used in a sample of investor-owned and NFP firms. Within the IO sample, a combined model (BR and traditional determinants)that uses the...