Despite decelerating economic growth, China’s macro leverage ratio remains on the rise. Concurrently, the widespread debt maturity mismatch, characterized by “short-term borrowing for long-term investment”, has intensified the buildup of corporate default risks. There have been rich discussions on the determinants of corporate debt maturity mismatch, but most of them adopt a supply-side perspective of debt fi-nancing, emphasizing that firms passively incur maturity mismatch due to limited access to long-term financing. This paper takes family firms, an important organizational form of private enterprises, as the starting point to explore how family control affects firms’ strategies for debt maturity management.

Using a sample of private listed companies in China from 2003 to 2023, this paper finds that compared with non-family firms, family firms exhibit a lower level of debt maturity mismatch. Mechanism testing indicates that this difference primarily stems from family firms’ adjustments to their asset structure. Textual analysis of the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections of annual reports, together with evidence from R&D investment and operating outcomes, further shows that family firms are more risk-averse. In addition, the negative effect of family control on debt maturity mismatch is more pronounced when economic policy uncertainty is higher. Analysis based on the FIBER framework of socioemotional wealth theory reveals that the inhibitory effect is stronger among firms with higher family ownership, stronger family identification, closer binding social ties, deeper emotional attachment, and founder- or successor-CEOs. Economic consequence analysis shows that, for a given level of debt maturity mismatch, family firms are associated with a lower probability of default; in the face of liquidity shocks, they exhibit greater organizational resilience, as reflected in a significantly higher likelihood of post-crisis stock price recovery compared to non-family firms.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, it extends the explanatory framework for debt matu-rity mismatch by shifting the focus from the supply side of debt financing to asset-side decision-making, thereby offering a new perspective on the buildup of debt risks in real-economy firms. Second, it finds that family firms exercise greater prudence in debt maturity management, and systematically reveals the unique value of family firms in risk management from a full life-cycle perspective, advancing the theoretical understanding of family firms’ debt behavior and enriching the literature on the competitive advantages of family firms. Third, it highlights the importance of asset-side resource allocation in debt risk management and provides practical implications for firms to optimize debt structures.