Toward an empirical investigation of the long-term debt and financing deficit nexus: evidence from Chinese-listed firms

As the literature has studied the financing method of Chinese-listed firms for a long time, but with inconclusive indications, this research thus adopts non-financial Chinese-listed firms’ data from 2003 to 2015 to investigate the relationship between long-term debt financing and financing deficit. We pay particular attention to three channels (ownership concentration, market timing, and state ownership) that potentially affect the adoption of long-term debt financing when there is a financing deficit. The empirical analysis documents a positive relationship between financing deficit and changes in the long-term debt ratio in our sampled firms for both static and dynamic panel models. Moreover, among the three channels we show that state ownership has the strongest positive impact on the adoption of long-term debt financing, followed by ownership concentration, while the weakest channel is the market timing’s negative effect. In general, our empirical analysis finds that the important external financing method of long-term debt is most likely to be impacted by the state ownership aspect.