Data_CEO power and debt policy persistence

Our sample data are obtained from the China Stock Market Accounting Research Database (CSMAR) for 1999-2016 for all the listed firms. The CSMAR database has been widely used in prior research on China’s listed firms (Chen et al. 2011^[4]; Xu et al. 2014^[40]). The initial sample had 34,721 firm-year observations. The process of sample selection is shown in Table 1. As in prior studies, we exclude 819 firm-year observations of financial firms because of their unique accounting standards and capital structure. To ensure that the initial debt policy variable can be measured, we also delete the 2,538 firm-year observations for which listing date is missing. To obtain the value of the debt policy in the year of the IPO, we further exclude the 13,674 firm-years observations of 813 firms listed before 1999 that lack of relevant data. In addition, 121 firm-year observations with leverage ratio greater than 1 are also excluded. Moreover, to minimise the effects of outliers, we also winsorise each continuous variable at the 1% and 99% levels. Finally, our sample consists of 2240 unique firms and 17 569 firm-year observations over a period of 18 years from 1999 to 2016.