RDP 9216: The Evolution of Corporate Financial Structure: 1973–1990 Appendix 1: Data

The database used in this study consists of 224 firms. There are both listed and unlisted firms in the sample; however, no financial institutions have been included because of their different balance sheet structures. Of the 114 firms that do not have complete data series, 22 firms do not have data until in 1973 and 104 firms ceased to have data available prior to 1990. The firms that left the sample prior to 1990 did so for a variety of reasons. Some were taken over or merged with other companies thereby losing their identity in the parent company. These firms continued operating but did not generate separate financial statements and thus had to be excluded. Others left the sample because of financial distress. A full listing of the companies in the database is given below. Those with an asterisk do not have complete data for the entire sample period.

Aggregate and industry Gross Domestic Product figures were taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics publications catalogues 5206.0 and 5222.0 respectively. They run from the third quarter in 1974 through to the first quarter in 1992. Mining, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade are taken directly from 5222.0 while service output is approximated by the aggregation of the transport and storage, the communication and the finance, property and business services industries.

Nominal total Gross Domestic Product and the Net Operating Surplus of corporate trading enterprises (including public trading enterprises) was obtained from catalogue 5204.0 published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The total assets of private corporate trading enterprises in 1990 was obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, catalogue 5232.0.

The Overdraft interest rate in Graph 7 was extracted Table F.3 in the Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin series. It is the minimum of a range of indicator rates reported by major Australian banks.

The total assets of financial institutions, excluding the Reserve Bank of Australia, were obtained from Table 3.4A of Occasional Paper No. 8, published by the Reserve Bank in 1990.