The empirical results reveal an inverse relationship between capital structure and
the strength of shareholder rights. Debt seems to help mitigate agency costs in firms
where shareholder rights are restricted. In these firms, the debt ratio is positively related
to the degree of restrictiveness of corporate governance – the more suppressive the
governance, the weaker the shareholder rights and the higher the debt ratio. Further
analysis indicates that regulation substitutes for shareholder rights to reduce agency costs.
Specifically, there appears to be no relationship between leverage and shareholder rights
in regulated firms. We argue that this is the case because regulation already allays agency
costs (Kole and Lehn, 1997), hence, the role of debt in mitigating agency problems is less