한국 숙박업체의 연령과 부채만기구조

This study aims at investigating the effects of firm age on debt maturity structure using a sample of private lodging firms. The agency hypothesis states that young firms prefer to issue short-term debt because they have higher growth opportunities. The signaling hypothesis proposes that older firms issue more short-term debt to minimize information asymmetry due to the mis-pricing of long-term debt. The liquidity risk hypothesis suggests that old firms issue short-term debt because they have high profitability and generate stable cash flows and thus have low liquidity risk. In contrast, young firms prefer to issue short-term debt because they are more likely to face liquidity risk due to their insufficient cash flows. The findings of this study are as follows. First, this study finds a positive association between firm age and the proportion of short-term debt, which provides strong support for a signaling hypothesis. Second, this study finds that a one-standard-deviation increase in firm age is associated with an increase of about 2.5% of a standard deviation in the proportion of short-term debt. This finding suggests that the effect of firm age on the proportion of short-term debt is economically significant. Third, using quadratic and piecewise regressions, this study examines whether firm age is non-linearly related to the proportion of short-term debt. This study finds the inverted U-shaped relationship between firm age and the proportion of short-term debt, which is not consistent with a liquidity risk hypothesis.