Maturity Matching in Unlisted Firms: The Within-Firm Evidence

Debt maturity, the split of a firm’s borrowing between short- and long-term debt, determines its exposure to refinancing risk, yet for small unlisted firms, it has rarely been studied as an outcome. This paper asks whether the debt maturity of such firms is associated with their asset composition in the way the maturity-matching principle predicts, with long-lived assets matched by long-term debt, and whether this association holds within firms and not only across firms. We use 73,662 annual balance sheets of 11,265 Italian unlisted firms (innovative start-ups, innovative SMEs and ordinary SMEs) over 2016–2024. The core analysis is a panel model that compares each firm with itself over time; dynamic and instrumental-variable estimates serve as robustness checks, an exploratory clustering describes heterogeneity, and a machine learning comparison diagnoses functional form. Within the same firm, a ten-percentage-point rise in the share of fixed assets is associated with about 2.5 percentage points less short-term debt, against 3.8 points across firms, and the evidence suggests gradual adjustment, although its long-run size depends on the dynamic model. The association is weaker among innovative firms; for innovative SMEs, the difference is largely accounted for by the intangible composition of their fixed assets, and non-linear models add little to the linear specification. The negative within-firm association predicted by maturity matching is, thus, robust among unlisted firms, and its strength varies with the type of assets firms hold. All results are associations rather than causal effects, and the mechanisms behind the differences across groups are not tested.