The dynamic characteristics and influencing factors of debt structure of the public companies in China

Design/methodology/approach: Learned from Leary (2009), Konstantinos Voutsinas and Richard A.Werner (2011), this study designs a model of debt maturity structure with an unbalanced panel data set. It consists of 1352 Chinese listed companies with8124 observations during the period of 2003-2011. Hausman test hasbeen used, and the findings support the fixed effects model.Findings: Besidesthe factors that have been confirmed by previous researches, debt maturitystructure is also sensitive to other factors, such as economicexpectations, monetary policy, financial restrictions and changes in tax rates.Research limitations/implications: There are still many cases, which affect the debt maturitystructure, are worth of further exploring, for instance, the impactof lagged monetary policy, the determinants of short-term debt ratio and thecost of operating.Practical implications: From the macro point of view, research in this area enable thegovernment to introduce more suitable policies that direct and promote thedevelopment of the bond market, thus it spurs corporations to choose theproper finance structure. From the micro point of view, firms can learn fromthe research to choose the efficient method and term of financing as well asdebt structure.Originality/value: In some way, conclusions of this papercontribute to the study of dynamic characteristics and factors of debt maturitystructure in Chinese listed companies.