Study On Factors Influencing The Debt Maturity Structure In Chinese Listed Companies

Since the MM theorem was established in 1950s, great progress has been made in corporate finance theory. However, most of the scholars emphasized the leverage and seldom focused on the characteristics of debt structure. The reality is debt as finance way is more agility and sensitive, and it is closely bound up with value and risk of the enterprises. To the managers, debt can not only meet the demand of firms' operation and envelopment but also be referred to corporate governance and future business plans. Especially in Chinese listed companies, because of State-owned shares' losing control, the stockholders-regulating mechanism can not play up to the full. It is necessary for us to set up the corporate governance based on debt-regulating mechanism. So it has great theory value and operation significance to research on debt finance in China.From the present situation of Chinese listed companies' debt maturity structure, this thesis adopted regular method and empirical method to find out the essence of the debt maturity structure in China.Firstly I conclude the theories about debt maturity structure from seven sides: the agency cost hypothesis, the asymmetric information hypothesis, the tax hypothesis, the flotation cost hypothesis, the interest rate risk hypothesis, the maturity matching principle. Based on these theories and considered with the characteristic of Chinese listed companies, I bring forward 9 hypotheses and several factors that may be affecting the firms' debt maturity structure. Formatting a multiple linear regression model and taking the data to regress, the data are collected from twelve industries: manufacture industry, information technology, building industry and so on. The result shows that there are several factors affecting debt maturity structure significantly: size, lev, assets duration, equity concerning and final controller. They have significant correlation with debt maturity structure. In the end of the dissertation, several proposals are tabled from macroscopical and microcosmical sides to optimize the debt maturity structure.