An agency approach to debt maturity of unlisted and listed firms in the European setting

Alejandro Casino-Martínez, José López-Gracia, Reyes Mestre-Barberá and Amado Peiró-Giménez

European Management Journal, 2019, vol. 37, issue 3, 339-352

Abstract: This study analyses the debt maturity of two groups of companies – unlisted and listed – throughout the period 2005–2013. The research takes an agency costs approach to explore the determinants of firms' debt maturity structure for a set of five countries, chosen for being representative of the European Union (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). Agency costs, as well as institutional and macroeconomic factors, turn out to be decisive in explaining firms’ financial policies regarding debt maturity, during the economic crisis that started in 2007–2008. Our findings indicate that contracting costs had a greater impact on unlisted firms during the post-crisis subperiod than on their listed counterparts. Additionally, the economic effect of this has been estimated, corroborating the overall findings of the study.

Keywords: Listed and unlisted firms; Debt maturity; Agency costs; Institutional factors; Macroeconomic factors; Panel data methodology; Financial crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:37:y:2019:i:3:p:339-352

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DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2018.07.008

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