Prior work on leverage implicitly assumes capital availability depends solely on firm characteristics. However, market frictions that make capital structure relevant may be associated with a firm's source of capital. Examining this intuition, we find firms which have access to the public bond...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the firm's assets. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...