Institutional Environment, The Nature Of Ultimate Ownership And Corporate Debt Maturity Structure

The research of debt financing has always attached more attention on the study of capital structure for a long time. However the study of enterprise debt maturity is insufficient. In 1970s', foreign economists began to attach more and more attention on the research of the problem of the debt maturity structure. By now, there has been a great deal of debt maturity structure Mic-literature. And contracting-cost hypotheses, signaling hypotheses, tax hypotheses and maturity matching hypotheses have been well-known. The effects of institutional environment have been realized in recent ten years.In our country, the ownership and the political relation is high related. And the political relation plays an important role on debt finance. The ownership of enterprise absolutely effects the debt maturity structure. On this basis, this paper will systematically study the effect of institutional environment and ownership on the debt maturity structure. This study not only matches the situation of our country, but also enrich the research of the debt maturity structure theory.On the basis of listed company's empirical data, this paper applies the GLS method to empirical test how institutional environment and ownership effect the enterprise to choose the debt maturity. According to some related literature and NERI INDEX which is written by Gang Fan, Xiaolu Wang and Hengpeng Zhu, this paper chooses market development, government intervention, legal enforcement and financial development as the index of institutional environment. We find that market development, legal enforcement and financial development are negatively correlated with the proportion of long-term debt. And government intervention is positively correlated with the proportion of long-term debt. This shows that along with the constantly advancing of our country's marketization, the level of legal enforcement and financial development is promoted. This inhibits the enterprise to rely on political relationship to get long-term loans from bank. And due to the decrease of the government intervention, the debt contract between bank and enterprise is signed based on the principle of economic efficiency, not the government will. The proportion of long-term debt of the state-owned enterprises is significant higher than non-state-owned enterprises that indicates the state-owned enterprises with governmental background get long-term debt easily. The change of institutional environment remarkably effects the state-owned enterprises. And the change of legal enforcement and financial development is the main reason.