This paper investigates whether the relative liquidity of a firm's bonds versus its stock affects its capital structure choice. As capital structure decisions involve balancing the costs and benefits of different financing alternatives, the relative liquidity of bonds versus stock plausibly matters since a relative liquidity differential might lead to one financing option being materially (relatively) cheaper than the other. As predicted, we find some evidence that, other things being equal, firms with relatively more liquid bonds compared to stock have higher leverage. While the relationship between bond-stock relative liquidity and leverage is statistically significant, our evidence suggests that it comes with only modest economic importance.

Dynamic panel models play an increasingly important role in numerous areas of corporate finance research, and a variety of (biased) estimation methods have been proposed in the literature. The biases inherent in these estimation methods have a material impact on inferences about corporate behavior, especially when the empirical model is misspecified. We propose a bias-corrected global minimum variance (GMV) combined estimation procedure to mitigate this estimation problem. We choose the capital structure speed of adjustment (SOA) setting to illustrate the proposed method using both simulated and actual empirical corporate finance data. The GMV estimator non-trivially reduces bias and hence meaningfully increases the reliability of inferences based on parameter estimates. This method can be readily applied to many other corporate finance contexts.