Purpose This study aims to determine if the quality of national institutions and banking development condition the maturity of debt depending on the horizon of short or long term. Design/methodology/approach Analysis is performed on a sample of 116 nonfinancial companies from Peru and Brazil. The measures of quality of national institutions and banking development were obtained from World Bank data and included factorial analysis for dynamic considerations. Findings The findings, through the treatment of pointed indicators, the factor analysis and the subsequent estimation of a dynamic econometric model, called GMM-SYS, show that institutional quality fosters the maturity of long-term debt and banking development boots short-term financial relations. Research limitations/implications Evaluating different measures of the quality of national institutions and banking development is necessary to demonstrate the robustness of the results beyond the sample evaluated in Latin America. Practical implications The research allows to understand the interaction between national institutions and system banking through debt maturity, and this is useful for establishing common target between both groups. Social implications It is important for corporate finance to understand the mechanisms of the interaction between national institutions and system banking, because this affects internal decisions of firms regarding financial implications. Originality/value The treatment of measures of national institutions and banking development include dynamic considerations, and the application of this study in Latin America provides new findings regarding these kind of indexes and their interaction with firms´ features such as debt maturity.

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We analyze whether firms that receive Venture Capital (VC) at a later date face more financial constraints than a one-by-one matched sample of firms that did not receive VC funding (control group). The aim is to check whether their financial flexibility explains why they decide to seek external equity funding. In contrast with other papers, which focus on the sensitivity of investments to cash flow, we study this issue by applying a dynamic model to analyze the speed of adjustment to their target debt levels prior to receiving the first VC investment. We analyze a representative sample of 237 Spanish unlisted firms that received VC between 1995 and 2007 and its corresponding control group. We find that firms that receive VC funding show a significantly lower speed of adjustment than their matched peers before the initial VC round. It seems that the former are more concerned about funding the required investments than about adjusting the firm's debt ratio to a target level. Our results confirm the role of VC in filling the equity gap in constrained unlisted firms. From a capital structure perspective, VC may become a tool for these companies to balance their capital structure in a growth process.