This study examines the impact of corporate governance on capital structure decisions based on a large panel of Chinese listed firms. Using the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator to control for unobserved heterogeneity, endogeneity, and persistency in capital structure decisions, we document that the ownership structure plays a significant role in determining leverage ratios. More specially, we find that managerial ownership has a positive and significant impact on firms’ leverage, consistent with the incentive alignment hypothesis. We also find that managerial ownership only affects the leverage decisions of private firms in the post-2005 split share reform period. State ownership negatively influence leverage decisions implying that SOEs may face fewer restrictions in equity issuance and may receive favourable treatments when applying for seasoned equity 􀂿nancing, thus use less debt. Furthermore, our results show that while foreign ownership negatively influences leverage decisions, legal person shareholding positively influences firms’ leverage decisions only for state controlled firms. We also find that the board structure variables (board size and the proportion of independent directors) do not influence firms’ capital structure decisions. Our findings suggest that recent ownership reforms have been successful in terms of providing incentive to managers through managerial shareholdings to take risky financial choices.

The study examines the effects of growth opportunities, debt maturity and liquidity risk on leverage, making use of a large panel of Chinese listed firms. Research on capital structure has broadened its scope from a single capital structure decision (the debt/equity choice) to various attributes of the debt in firms’ capital structure. We use the system Generalized Method of Moments estimator to control for unobserved heterogeneity and the potential endogeneity of regressors. We find a negative relationship between growth opportunities and leverage. Further, we find that while the proportion of short-term debt attenuates the negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage, it negatively affects leverage as predicted by the liquidity risk hypothesis. When we distinguish between state owned firms and private controlled firms, we find evidence that these effects are only relevant to private controlled firms. However, our analysis indicates that the economic implication of liquidity risk effect is much lower for Chinese firms than that observed in the literature for US firms. Our study suggests that these differences can be explained by differences in the institutional environment in which firms operate. This finding related to Diamond’s (1991) liquidity risk hypothesis extends our understanding of the relationship between liquidity risk and the debt maturity choice.