Empirical Study On The Impact Of Ownership Structure Over Debt Maturity Based On China’s Listed Companies’ Evidence

As a typical for-profit organization, the company must have sufficient funds to maintain normal survival and development, so financing is the premise of all business activities. As an aspect of corporate financing decisions, the debt financing is very important. How to reduce their costs and risks while using its leverage effectively is an important topic to academics and practitioners. The choice of debt maturity is the key to debt financing decisions. The risks and benefits of different debt maturity are different, so effectively weigh debt maturity’s the benefits against costs and make an reasonable arrangement of it is inevitably essential. As an important aspect of corporate governance, ownership structure affects the opportunistic behavior of holding shareholders and managements, affects the financial decisions and inevitably affects the choice of debt maturity. The effective choice of debt maturity still can, to some extent, lighten agency conflicts that exist in the company. In a word, the company’s ownership structure has an impact on debt maturity inevitably. China’s ownership structure is more special, its dominance phenomenon is serious, so foreign research results can’t be copied and it is necessary to do this study from China’s capital market. This study helps us further understand how the ownership structure impact on debt maturity, and helps listed companies to improve the ownership structure and debt financing, it is also a guidance for the government to formulate specific regulations and economic policies.In this article, ownership structure will be divided into three aspects, which are ownership concentration, equity balance and the identity of the shareholders, which are further subdivided into state-owned shares, legal person shares. outstanding shares, managerial ownership and institutional ownership. In the background of related research, this research focuses on analyzing how and to what extent does these seven aspects debt maturity, we discuss how the company choose debt maturity under different ownership structure, and at last forward my own views through research for the existing capital market.This article consists of five parts. The first part describes the research background, motivation and significance, sorts out the related literature, points out their contributions and shortages, and puts forward ideas and innovation of this study. In the second part, we will make detailed explanation and analysis of the theoretical basis, which are the asymmetric information theory, principal-agent theory, and the control right theory of debt financing, all these pave the way for the later study. The third part proposes hypothesis on the premise of China’s specific national conditions and institutional background, lists the relevant variables and the corresponding indicators, and builds an empirical model. The fourth part makes descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis of the sample data for the past five years. The fifth part demonstrates the empirical conclusions and research limitations drawn by the previous analysis, based on which the thesis put forward related policy suggestions.The research results show that ownership structure does have a major impact on debt maturity. There is a U-shaped relationship between the proportion of the first shareholder and debt maturity structure, and the cut-off point of the trend is37.01%. In other words, within a certain range, the company equity is relatively fragmented, and free-rider phenomenon is more serious, so company needs to use short-term debt to constraint management, contrarily when the proportion is gradually increasing, company tends to use long-term debt. The equity balance has a significant positive correlation with the debt maturity, that is with the improvement of equity balance, the tunneling behavior of the controlling shareholder can be controlled, accordingly the reliance on short-term debt can be reduced. Regards the identity of the shareholders, the state-owned shares shows an obvious negative relationship with debt maturity, both legal person shareholder rate and circulation shareholder rate have an obvious positive relationship with debt maturity, management shareholder rate, generally low, has an negative relationship with debt maturity, nearly in the level of10%; Institutional shareholder rate has a significant positive correlation with the debt maturity.In this paper, to research this topic from different aspects, we use the latest data of the2007～2011non-financial listed companies and make detailed and comprehensive division of ownership structure. In recent years, with the gradual deepening of the shareholding reform, the institutional shareholder ratio is increasing. However, people’s attitudes toward it are different, this article will make analysis of it, and test its impact on debt maturity through an empirical model. To some degree, the results can provide further complement to the existing research.