Empirical Studies On The Effect Of Debt Maturity Structure On Firm’s Performance Of Chinese Listed Companies

The research of debt finance includes total debt and debt financing structure. At present most studies focus on the total debt research. But we can’t see so many studies about the debt structure. It should be noticed that the debt maturity structure as an important part of debt structure, contributing to improve the company performance and corporate governance. It makes a big difference that whether the debt maturity is reasonable. Domestic scholars have done very few studies about the effect of debt maturity choice on the company performance. So my paper focuses on this topic.Firstly, the papers analyzes some related theories about debt maturity structure, including agency theory、signaling theory、tax theory and immunisation hypothesis. Accordingly, empirical research of the papers is on the basis of those four theories. The empirical study of the debt maturity firstly researches the financing status of domestic listed company. The outcome shows that the debt to asset ration and long-term debt ration of listed company in our country totally lower than foreign listed company. Then we research the financing status of domestic listed company, with principal component analysis and empirical research using balance panel data of697Chinese non-financing companies from2005to2010. We also establish models of debt maturity and firm performance and makes regression analysis. The outcome shows that the debt maturity of our country is shorter than many developed countries, and the debt maturity structure is positively related to the company performance. This outcome means that the debt maturity is important to a company, and the debt maturity in our country needs to be improved. Finally,we do some further analysis of the results:and find out that debt maturity is vary between various industries, which is consistent with immunisation hypothesis. Besides, the size of company is positively related to debt maturity, which is consistent with agency theory. The final results show that the total debt level of Chinese listed companies is low, but the rate of short-term debt is too high. The debt maturity has significant negative impact on company performance.Finally, based on the outcome and the current financing environment, we analyze the reasons of the empirical study results and give some recommendation to the listed company on how to optimize debt maturity in Chinese capital market.