This paper revisits the External Financial Dependence (EFD) index originally formulated employing data for American firms in the 1980s by Rajan and Zingales (1998). This index is meant to reflect technological characteristics of the industries and it is commonly assumed that its values are stable in time and across countries. Despite its popularity, there have been reduced attempts to extend the original estimations. This paper fills this gap, providing new estimations of the EFD index for G7 countries between 1980 and 2015. First, we argue that, theoretically, there are different factors (mostly related to technical change) that can alter the values of the EFD index. Second, we show that the assumptions of stability in time and space find little empirical support. Third, it is maintained that the EFD index can be considered a proxy of corporate net lending as there are significant theoretical and empirical similarities between the two concepts.

本文重新审视了最初由 Rajan 和 Zingales (1998) 在 1980 年代使用美国公司数据制定的外部金融依赖 (EFD) 指数。该指数旨在反映行业的技术特征，并且通常假设其值在时间和国家之间是稳定的。尽管它很受欢迎，但扩展原始估计的尝试已经减少。本文填补了这一空白，提供了 1980 年至 2015 年 G7 国家 EFD 指数的新估计。首先，我们认为，从理论上讲，有不同的因素（主要与技术变化有关）可以改变 EFD 指数的值。其次，我们表明时间和空间稳定性的假设几乎没有经验支持。第三，