Since the seminal work of Modigliani and Miller (1961), much has been learned about corporate debt decisions. Typically, larger firms with a higher proportion of fixed assets are more indebted, and the more profitable have lower indebtedness (Rajan and Zingales, 1995). Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) show, however, that a substantial part of the indebtedness is determined by unobservable characteristics that are constant in time. The importance of these characteristics is consistent with the continued indebtedness of US publicly traded companies and their convergence to targets that change over time. Are non-observable characteristics constant in time also relevant to the indebtedness of Brazilian companies? There are reasons to believe that not. The Brazilian economy is marked by a high volatility of macroeconomic factors such as interest rates, exchange rates and inflation. Such volatility may magnify cyclical factors to a point that overlaps more structural factors of debt decisions. In this case, the documented convergence of the target debt of US companies may simply not exist in Brazil. The main objective of this dissertation is to study the permanent and transitory factors of indebtedness decisions in Brazil, verifying in which sectors of the economy the former are more important than the last, and evaluating if the combinations of these transitory factors rule out the existence of a target debt average for publicly traded companies in Brazil.