The Impact Of Corporate Debt Maturity Structure On Agent Cost

Since the MM theorem was established in 1950s,great Progress has been made in corporate finance theory. With the continuous development of capital structure theory and its innovation, scholars pay more attention to the debt maturity structure which is an important content of the capital structure. In the finance theory,the study on corporate financing is inclined to the choice of pure leverage,moreover,the long-term debt and current debt are recognized as homogeneous. At abroad,since the 1970s,Debt Maturity Structure(DMS),as one of the most important part of corporate capital structure,has received more and more concern and attention. Some important theories successively generated, such as agency cost theory, signaling theory, contract theory and so on. In domestic,the study on Debt Maturity Structure has just begun and there exist lots of defects. In addition,with the further development of Chinese capital market,listed SMEs have not only become the main force and excellent representatives of Chinese enterprises, but also the important part of Chinese national economy. The study on the DMS of listed SMEs can describe and explain the reform process of Chinese economy and political structure, reveal and predict the perceptiveness of the Chinese market economy, and reflect and symbolize the Chinese national economy level.In this paper, western mature DMS theory is fully used to prove that the introduction of short-term debt can effectively reduce corporate agent cost and improve the value of corporate. Taking the Chinese listed SMEs as samples to make empirical analysis, it draws the relative conclusion and is aimed to reflect the objective laws of market economy, explain the relationship between Chinese listed corporate agent cost and DMS, and do research on the feasibility of classical DMS theory in Chinese listed SMEs.Along with this theme, the main contents are as follows: Firstly, the related research results of agent cost and debt maturity Structure are reviewed. Secondly the research hypotheses are proposed from signaling theory and contract theory. After the empirical analysis, it concludes that significant negative correlation between agent cost and short-term debt ratio exists. At last we came to the conclusion that we should establish internal supervision mechanism,improve the external constraint mechanism and increasing governmental relative policies ,what's more, strengthening the relative legal and superintendent is necessary.