A Study On Company Features Factors Which Influence The Debt Maturity Structure Of China Listed Manufacturing Companies

Corporate finance decision-making is an important part of modern financial management. On the one hand corporate finance decision-making should determine the capital structure; on the other hand it should determine the debt financing structure. The debt maturity structure is an important part of the debt financing structure, which is aimed to determine the ratio between long-term liabilities and short-term liabilities. Compared with the development of the research on the capital structure, the development of the research on the debt financing structure including the issue of debt maturity structure is relatively stagnant, and the existing research has focused largely on foreign countries. Four mainly theoretical hypotheses come in to shape:Agency Cost Hypothesis, Signal Hypothesis, Tax Hypothesis, and Matching Hypothesis.Firstly, the paper made a systematical review of the literature about the debt maturity structure, which helped identify a series of factors, including the company features factors and so on. Secondly, the company features factors were analyzed more detailed to supply the hypotheses for the empirical research. Then the financial data between the year of 2004 and 2008 for 641 domestic manufacturing listed companies were chosen and the status of debt maturity structure of them were described and analyzed detailed. On this basis the empirical test was conducted by the multiple linear regression models, and the study found the asset maturity structure, financial leverage, corporate quality, free cash flow and firm size factors impacted on the debt maturity structure significantly. While the growth option and the effective tax rate impacted on the debt maturity structure insignificantly. Finally the paper carried out the summary of the empirical study, made recommendations about how to arrange and optimize the debt maturity structure, and analyzed the limitations of this study.