Table 1 presents summary statistics for the long-term debt ratio, the creditor rights scores and the country- and firm-level
controls for the 48 countries included in our sample. The number of firm-years available for analysis differs greatly from country
to country. In our analysis below, we ensure that large countries such as the U.S. and Japan do not drive our results. As Panel A
shows, the mean values of the long-term debt ratio (LT Debt/TA) vary widely across countries.11 These means are highest at 0.23
and 0.22 for Norway and Portugal, respectively—countries with relatively weak creditor protection (i.e., creditor rights scores of 2
and 1, respectively)—while they are low for countries such as Morocco and Nigeria. Creditor rights scores also vary widely across
countries. As Brockman and Unlu (2009) point out, there is considerable variation in creditor rights across countries with similar
legal origins and shareholder rights scores. For example, while the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia are all common law
countries that tend to rank towards the top of the shareholder rights index, the U.K. and Australia rank towards the top of the
creditor rights index whereas the U.S. and Canada rank towards the bottom. The two macroeconomic control variables—Inflation
and GDPG—display substantial variation across countries, indicating that it is essential to control for these variables in our
regressions.