There is a growing interest in the financing of social enterprises (Bruton et al., 2015; Fleming and Sorenson, 2016). Nonetheless, the existing entrepreneurial finance literature, with its often explicit focus on profit maximization, has a significant gap in both theorizing and empirical evidence regarding the extent to which capital structures of for-profit social enterprises differ from commercial enterprises. We draw on imprinting theory and the social entrepreneurship literature to develop a new perspective on how capital structure differences emerge and evolve between for-profit social and commercial enterprises. Taking an imprinting theory perspective (e.g., Boeker, 1989; Stinchcombe, 1965), entrepreneurs are expected to shape capital structures at founding and initial capital structures will have a lasting influence on future capital structures. Entrepreneurs in forprofit social enterprises want to create value for society and aim to find sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems (Mair et al., 2012; Santos, 2012). Because social goals often require longer term investments (Bacq and Lumpkin, 2014), for-profit social entrepreneurs also tend to have a longer term orientation than commercial entrepreneurs. Consequently, for-profit social entrepreneurs may prefer to avoid situations where they have to subordinate their (longer term) social goals to the (shorter term) financial necessity of having to make strictly-timed debt payments. Therefore, our first hypothesis states that over time capital structures of for-profit social enterprises will include less debt financing than commercial enterprises. Social entrepreneurs, with compassion and motivation to create social value (Miller et al., 2012), are unlikely to compromise their social goals, when more debt becomes optimal from a purely financial perspective, thereby making their capital structures more persistent. Furthermore, attention is a scarce resource, particularly for for-profit social entrepreneurs, who are managing more complex, hybrid organizations (Stevens et al., 2015b). Consequently, for-profit social entrepreneurs may also spend less attention to analyzing and adjusting their capital structures than commercial entrepreneurs. Therefore, our second hypothesis states that the influence of initial leverage ratios on future leverage will remain stronger over time among for-profit social enterprises than commercial enterprises.