انتخاب سررسید بدهی های شرکت های بزرگ در بازارهای مالی نوظهور

This paper investigates the determinants of liability maturity choice in emerging markets using a unique panel of 4500 Ukrainian firms during the period 2000–2006. Our estimates confirm the importance of agency costs, liquidity, signaling, and taxes for the liability term structure of firms operating in a transition economy. Firm creditworthiness and access to long-term financing at bond markets are the key drivers of corporate debt structure. This study provides strong evidence that constrained and unconstrained companies react differently on liquidity risk and, hence, pursue different debt maturity strategies.

The optimal term structure of corporate debt has attracted considerable attention among financiers and economists. Along with leverage, liquidity, and dividend policies, managers also choose the debt maturity structure to maximize the value of their firm. Importantly, sound and developed financial systems substantially facilitate this “tuning” of capital structure, while emerging markets are imputed to have some restrictions that thwart firms to set up the optimal debt maturity. Specifically, due to lower profitability and limited access to markets companies in developing countries use considerably less long-term debt in comparison with their counterparts in developed countries Caprio et al., 1998 and Schmukler and Vesperoni, 2006. In this article we extend this literature by sheding light onto the key hypotheses of the debt maturity choice in an undeveloped financial environment, a topic thus far neglected in the literature. Generally, three non-mutually exclusive theories on the choice of liability maturity structure have been developed in financial literature: the contracting-cost hypothesis, the asymmetric information hypothesis, and tax hypothesis (Barclay & Smith, 1995).1 The contracting-cost hypothesis argues that agency costs lead to an under-investment problem, if projects with positive net present value are not undertaken. As a partial solution of the conflict between equityholders and bondholders, companies decrease the maturity of their debt liabilities (Myers, 1977). Considering investment as real options, the firms employ shorter-maturity debt to have more growth options in their investment opportunities. Debt that matures before execution of investment options cannot lead to suboptimal investment decisions. The asymmetric information setup leads to the signalling and liquidity hypotheses. The signalling explanation states that issuance of short-term debt is a positive signal of the firm’s low credit risk (Kale & Noe, 1990). Flannery (1986) argues that undervalued companies prefer high priority claims (e.g. secured short-term debt) to indicate their creditworthiness, while their low-quality counterparts favor long-term debt because they cannot afford to roll over short-term debt in case of positive transaction costs. As an improved credit rating leads to a lower risk premium, debt maturity is negatively related to firm quality. Supporting the liquidity argument, Diamond (1991b) finds that firms with the highest credit rankings prefer to issue short-term debt because of small refinancing risks. This conjecture again implies a negative relationship as better performing firms are more likely to avoid a “crisis at maturity”. Finally, the tax hypothesis analyzes the tax implications of the debt maturity choice. For example, Brick & Ravid (1985) find that the firms employ more long-term debt when the term structure has a positive slope. Higher-priced long-term debt enables the firm to avoid more taxes: an effect that is the more attractive the higher the firm’s profitability. However, a number of the assumptions made in the literature regarding the determinants of debt maturity are not plausible or require modification for firms operating in transition markets (Demirgüc-Kunt & Maksimovic, 1998). For example, in underdeveloped financial markets, companies are forced to use relatively expensive external funds. The volatility of the macroeconomic environment and the absence of a credit history increase the likelihood of both loan denial and default premium. Additionally, a smaller variety of products is available on the market and the borrowers are not able to send proper signals about their qualities. Therefore, the insights from the developed countries have to be revisited and confirmed in an emerging markets framework.2 The propositions are tested using a unique panel of 4500 Ukrainian firms during years 2000–2006. This turbulent environment with changing macro-economic conditions and capital market restrictions during transition is particularly well-suited for studying the capital structure decisions of firms. In this changing environment one can observe financial behaviour of firms that is not observable in more developed economies with less financial constraints, and thereby provides us with a better understanding of the hypothesized causes of corporate debt maturity choice. Our results show that debt maturity choices are significantly affected by firm quality and its access to long-term capital markets. Our study provides support for maturity matching, agency cost, liquidity, signaling and tax as being key to choosing debt maturity. Furthermore, financial constraints play an important role for explaining debt maturity choice. Firms with restricted access to external financing exhibit a higher sensitivity to earnings volatility and tax charges when choosing optimal liabilities structure, while their unconstrained peers are more susceptible to underinvestment and asset substitution issues and are also more prone to follow maturity matching. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a review of the relevant literature. The peculiarities of debt maturity choice during the transition period in Ukraine are described in Section 3. Section 4 presents the data, while empirical results are discussed in Section 5. Section 6 concludes.

This paper investigates the determinants of debt maturity choice in transition markets. By employing a panel dataset of balance sheets and income statements from about 4500 open joint stock Ukrainian companies over the period 2000–2006 we find sufficient evidence to support our hypotheses relating to the relevance of liquidity, signaling, maturity matching, and agency costs. Several features of corporate finance in emerging markets are worth special note. Our study demonstrates that financial frictions and access to capital markets substantially affect corporate debt maturity choice. The partition of our sample into categories of financially constrained and unconstrained firms allows us to discern some intrinsic features attributed to emerging markets. Overall, this study provides strong evidence that constrained and unconstrained companies react differently on liquidity risk and, hence, pursue different debt maturity strategies. For variables which restrict firms’ financial activity, the impact of the determinants of debt maturity becomes stronger. The higher magnitudes of corresponding coefficients imply that more constrained companies are more sensitive regarding the determinants of debt structure, a finding that can be considered as a typical feature of firms in emerging markets. Unconstrained companies are found to cope with agency conflicts by shortening the structure of their liabilities, while their counterparts with severe cash constraints are more vulnerable to liquidity risk. Furthermore, if a firm is small or/and has restricted access to bond markets, then the tax rate becomes a significant determinant of liabilities structure. Although our results are informative, we leave some questions unanswered to advance further research. First, the fact that taxes do not matter for debt maturity choice of larger firms and for firms with access to the bond markets deserves further attention in future work. Second, future studies should look into the reasons for the negative relationship between debt maturity and firm size for companies with access to capital markets as is found in this study. Specifically, one should analyze whether this result is related to agency costs and/or information asymmetry. From the economic policy perspective, our results indicate that firms’ liability structures are strongly affected by specific characteristics of emerging financial markets, implying that there is a pressing need to facilitate this phase of financial market development toward more stability. Financial market development would remove restrictions on efficient firm investment by reducing financial constraints (Love, 2003). Moreover, it would be useful to implement a legal requirement concerning the reporting of the effective credit rate to avoid confusing debtors and undervaluing their liquidation rates. Banks in emerging countries charge additional commissions for long-term loans, thus increasing the cost of long-term financing and potentially distorting firms’ financial decisions. Our study underlines that underdeveloped financial markets in emerging countries are an impediment to prudent long-term financing of companies.