Leverage and the maturity structure of debt in emerging markets

• Autor(a) principal: Mateus, Cesário
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Terra, Paulo Renato Soares
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10183/109527
• topic: Estrutura de capital; Países emergentes; Maturidade da dívida; Capital structure; Debt maturity; Dynamic panel data analysis; Latin America; Eastern Europe

The aim of this paper is to analyse for a multi-country large emerging market sample the choice between debt and equity simultaneously with the decision between short- and long-term debts. In order to investigate the joint decision among leverage and maturity, we examine an unique sample of 986 firms and 13,490 firm-year observations from Latin America and 686 firms and 7919 firm-year observations from Eastern Europe for the period 1990-2003. We employ dynamic panel data analysis using Generalized Method of moments. The empirical results support three main findings. First, the cross-effects between leverage and maturity behave exactly the opposite between Latin America and Eastern Europe sub-samples. Capital structure and debt maturity are policy complements in Latin America and substitutes in Eastern Europe. Second, there is a significant dynamic effects component in the determination of leverage and maturity. Finally, adjustment to the target maturity is by no means costless and instantaneous with firm facing moderate adjustment costs.