Haider Mohammed Ali Bani Ata

This study examines how balance-sheet leverage relates to quoted liquidity and equity valuation among Jordanian industrial and service companies. Public Amman Stock Exchange records provide 498 firm-year observations from 76 issuers during 2019–2025. A liquidity subsample comprises 351 observations from 59 issuers and 60,756 valid daily two-sided quotes. Issuer and year fixed-effects models use company-clustered inference, wild-cluster-bootstrap tests and issuer-deletion diagnostics. After size, profitability and share-price adjustment, a ten-percentage-point increase in liabilities/assets is associated with a 0.058 increase in log one-plus-median quoted spread (95% interval: 0.021–0.096; bootstrap p=0.004). The association remains positive across quote-coverage thresholds and issuer deletions. Adding trading activity reduces the estimate to approximately 0.039, with intervals crossing zero; lagged leverage is also inconclusive. The larger valuation sample yields less precise evidence for leverage, while a negative spread–valuation association remains vulnerable to common price scaling and simultaneity. Quote-coverage restrictions exclude less actively traded observations with wider spreads. The findings document a conditional contemporaneous association, not a causal financing effect, and demonstrate the importance of source traceability, price-level adjustment and explicit liquidity-selection diagnostics.