“…Political connection is measured, in the current study, using two proxies. The first measure is political connectivity; "Pc-connect" which is a dummy variable defined as (1) if one or more of the firm's large shareholders is an institution under governmental control, also if the current CEO or chairman or any top administrators is or was a government official or a member of the parliament or a minister, or is "closely-related" to top politicians, and (0) otherwise at year "t" (Boubakri, Cosset & Saffar, 2008;Xie & Zhang, 2020;Abdel-Fattah, El-Shayeb & America, 2020). The second measure for political connections is political strength; "Pc-strength".…”