Recently, the Chinese Government has strengthened the enforcement of bankruptcy laws to protect creditors’ rights. This study shed light on the effect of creditor protection on asset-debt maturity mismatch by employing a quasi-natural experiment in China. The results show that creditor protection mitigates maturity mismatch, and the effect is more pronounced among financially constrained firms. Results remain robust after the dynamic effects test, placebo test, propensity score matching approach, entropy balancing method, and controlling for COVID-19 shocks. Mechanism tests show that creditor protection decreases the cost of debt and reduces over-investment. The effect of creditor protection is pronounced in private companies, financially independent companies, and companies with secured loans. Creditor rights can alleviate maturity mismatch in firms with medium ownership concentration and managerial ownership levels. Economic consequences studies suggest that creditor protection reduces corporate default risk. This study reveals the mechanism and effect of creditor protection on asset-debt maturity mismatch in emerging markets, providing recommendations to policymakers for assessing and improving bankruptcy law regimes.

We investigate the role of natural culture in corporate risk-taking using measures of income variability, R&D spending, and use of long-term debt. We identify three dimensions of national culture that should influence corporate risk-taking, and we isolate the effects of country-level and firm-level variables by using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. The three specific cultural values that we study – harmony, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance-- have both direct and indirect effects on our various measures of risk-taking. These results survive when we control for firm-level and country-level characteristics.

Numerous papers in the “law and finance” literature have established that countries with better functioning legal institutions enjoy better developed capital markets, and that legal origin is a fundamental determinant of legal institutions (La Porta et al. 1997, 1998, 2006; Djankov et al. 2007). In this study, we test whether banks are willing to grant more credit to the private sector when they enjoy superior legal protection. We test this hypothesis using bank-level data from 45 emerging-market countries and a random-effects model that controls for bank heterogeneity. We find that lenders allocate a significantly higher portion of their assets to loans (i) where they enjoy English legal origin rather than French or Socialist legal origin; (ii) where enforcement of debt contracts is more efficient and (iii) where banks enjoy fewer restrictions on their operations. These support our hypothesis that superior legal protection leads to more bank credit, which, in turn, should lead to higher economic growth.