The Impact of Debt Maturity Structure on Financial Resilience: Evidence from Non-Financial Listed Firms on the Vietnamese Stock Market

Abstract

How the maturity structure of corporate debt shapes firms’ capacity to withstand financial pressure remains understudied, particularly in bank-dependent emerging markets. This study examines whether greater reliance on short-term debt weakens firms’ ability to absorb financial shocks. Using quarterly panel data for non-financial listed firms on the Vietnamese stock market from 2015 to 2025, we construct an accounting-based measure of financial resilience (FR), defined as the ratio of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) to the sum of short-term debt and interest expense, and measure debt maturity structure (DMS) as the proportion of short-term debt in total interest-bearing debt. Firm fixed-effects models with quarterly time fixed effects and firm-clustered standard errors are used to estimate the relationship. The results consistently show that firms with a higher proportion of short-term interest-bearing debt exhibit significantly lower financial resilience across all model specifications. This negative relationship remains robust after controlling for alternative measures of financial leverage and using a logarithmic transformation of the dependent variable. The findings highlight the importance of debt maturity management as a key component of corporate financing strategy for firms and policymakers seeking to enhance financial resilience.