The data used to construct our leverage variables and other firm characteristics come from the Worldscope database. Our
starting sample comprises firms from 95 countries over the 1991–2010 period. We omit financial and utility firms from the
analysis as well as observations with negative market-to-book equity ratios. We also require that sample countries have at least
ten valid firm-year observations. This requirement eliminates countries such as Argentina and Tunisia, which each has only eight
valid observations. The final sample, summarized in Table 1, consists of 151,855 firm-year observations across 48 countries over
the 1991–2010 period.