Content area
Abstract
Translation from original language as provided by author
While corporations are making their financing decisions, they not only face the trade-off between equity financing and debt financing, but also face the choice of debt maturity structure. For an enterprise, whether its debt maturity structure is reasonable or not is not only related to the utilization efficiency of funds, but also affect the corporate governance situation and its future operation. For the debt market, participants' decent debt maturity structure will also promote the healthy market operation and development. Therefore, it has great theory value and operation significance to research on debt maturity structure. This paper chose "An study on debt maturity structure and factors affecting it" as the topic of my dissertation, mainly answered two question: (1) What is the feature of debt maturity structure of listed companies in China? What factors significantly affected the corporate choose of debt maturity structure? (2) Whether it has any shortcoming on the debt market and corporate financial decision on debt maturity structure and if it has, how to improve it? The main content of this paper is composed of three parts. In the first part, the author summarized theories of debt maturity structure, accordingly chose a number of factors that may affect the debt finance structure of listed firms. The second part is the empirical part of the paper, I analyzed and explained the status quo of listed companies in China, then formatted both the single equation model and the simultaneous equation model and took data to regress by stepwise, empirically tested the factors' influence on debt maturity structure. The data used are collected from 11 industries and totally 202 sample companies over 2001 to 2006. The results show that considering the endogenous relation between debt maturity structure and capital structure or not impact the empirical results obviously. The whole level of debt maturity of listed companies in China is much lower compared to other developed countries. What is more, the growth opportunity factor and the free cash flow factor both have little impact on our debt maturity structure. In the third part, I summed up the empirical conclusions, found several shortcomings in corporations' plan on debt maturity structure, and then made micro and macro advises accordingly in order to optimize the debt maturity structure of listed companies in
