Empirical Study On The Effect Of Ownership Structure Of Chinese Listed Companies To Debt Maturity Structure

This paper applies fixed-effect regression, based on the data of 2588 listed Chinese firms from 2009-2013,to empirically examine the relationship between ownership structure and debt maturity using a sample of listed Chinese firms. In recent years, debt maturity structure has gradually become one of the important research object on financial decision-making, different choice of debt maturity structure has different effect on corporate governance. The author wants to combine the characteristics of the special institutional background of China and ownership structure of listed companies to study on this field further more. The empirical evidences suggest:(1)ownership structure is an important factor of influencing debt maturity choice; (2) there is a significantly positive relationship between the ratio of country-shares and debt maturity; (3) there is a significantly positive relationship between ownership concentration and debt maturity; (4) there is a significantly negative relationship between ownership check-balance and debt maturity; (5) there is a insignificantly negative relationship between manager ownership and debt maturity; (6) there is a insignificantly positive relationship between circulation stock and debt maturity. These evidences partly support the agency cost theory, support the bankruptcy risk theory, support the tax theory, and support the liquidity hypothesis about stock. In addition, according to the results of this empirical study, the author has given some advices about how to optimize the debt maturity structure, including the aspects of ownership structure of companies and the existing environment of China. This empirical study leads to another topic that is worthy of further study:what changes of debt maturity are caused by the conflict between large shareholders and minority shareholders, how to introduce variables to represent the level of investor protection and hostile takeover barriers proposed by foreign literature which lead to the conflict between the control shareholders and minority shareholders.