This article studies whether firm-level and country-level factors affect a corporation’s debt maturity in the case of Vietnam or not. The paper adopts the balance panel data of 267 listed companies on the two Vietnamese trading boards, HOSE and HNX, in the period from 2008 to 2015, estimated by the FEM, REM, 2SLS and GMM method. | VNU Journal of Science: Economics and Business, Vol. 33, No. 5E (2017) 26-39 Institutional Quality Matters and Vietnamese Corporate Debt Maturity Nguyen Hoang Thuy Bich Tram*, Tran Thi Thuy Linh 1 University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, 59C Nguyen Dinh Chieu, Dist. 3, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Received 4 December 2017 Revised 15 December 2017; Accepted 25 December 2017 Abstract: This article studies whether firm-level and country-level factors affect a corporation’s debt maturity in the case of Vietnam or not. The paper adopts the balance panel data of 267 listed companies on the two Vietnamese trading boards, HOSE and HNX, in the period from 2008 to 2015, estimated by the FEM, REM, 2SLS and GMM method. For intrinsic factors, research results show that financial leverage and default risk control have a high positive statistical significance with debt maturity, but tangible assets are lower than those factors. In addition, growth opportunities and company quality have negative impacts on debt maturity. For external factors, the results point out that economic growth, stock market development and governmental regulation efficiency demonstrate a positive relationship with debt maturity with fairly low correlation levels. In spite of that, the inflation rate, financial development, the rule of law, corruption control and the rights of creditor factors have negative correlations with debt maturity. Keywords: Debt maturity, long-term debt ratio, GMM system, firm-level factors, country-level factors. 1. Introduction * Recently, research on corporate finance management into the optimal debt ratio has continued and extended into decision on debt maturity structure. Such decisions play an important role in a company. They can both affect investment decisions in terms of the cost of capital and influence dividend decisions in terms of cash flow. At present, corporate debt maturity structure is studied in not only developed economies such as those of Barclay and Smith .
