This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian civil law countries located in the middle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified shareholders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.

Law and Finance

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common-law countries generally have the strongest, and Frenchcivil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German- and Scandinavian-civil-law countries located in the middle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified shareholders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.

This paper surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world.

A Survey of Corporate Governance

This article surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DEALS WITH the ways in which suppliers of finance to corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment. How do the suppliers of finance get managers to return some of the profits to them? How do they make sure that managers do not steal the capital they supply or invest it in bad projects? How do suppliers of finance control managers? At first glance, it is not entirely obvious why the suppliers of capital get anything back. After all, they part with their money, and have little to contribute to the enterprise afterward. The professional managers or entrepreneurs who run the firms might as well abscond with the money. Although they sometimes do, usually they do not. Most advanced market economies have solved the problem of corporate governance at least reasonably well, in that they have assured the flows of enormous amounts of capital to firms, and actual repatriation of profits to the providers of finance. But this does not imply that they have solved the corporate governance problem perfectly, or that the corporate governance mechanisms cannot be improved. In fact, the subject of corporate governance is of enormous practical impor

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This paper documents that strategies which buy stocks that have performed well in the past and sell stocks that have performed poorly in the past generate significant positive returns over 3- to 12-month holding periods. We find that the profitability of these strategies are not due to their systematic risk or to delayed stock price reactions to common factors. However, part of the abnormal returns generated in the first year after portfolio formation dissipates in the following two years. A similar pattern of returns around the earnings announcements of past winners and losers is also documented

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Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency

In the Anglo‐American constitutional tradition, judicial checks and balances are often seen as crucial guarantees of freedom. Hayek distinguishes two ways in which the judiciary provides such checks and balances: judicial independence and constitutional review. We create a new database of constitutional rules in 71 countries that reflect these provisions. We find strong support for the proposition that both judicial independence and constitutional review are associated with greater freedom. Consistent with theory, judicial independence accounts for some of the positive effect of common‐law legal origin on measures of economic freedom. The results point to significant benefits of the Anglo‐American system of government for freedom.

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Judicial Checks and Balances

When world trade is costly, a country can profitably industrialize only if its domestic markets are large enough. In such a country, for increasing returns technologies to break even, sales must be high enough to cover fixed setup costs. We suggest two conditions conducive to industrialization. First, a leading sector, such as agriculture or exports, must grow and provide the source of autonomous demand for manufactures. Second, income generated by this leading sector must be broadly enough distributed that it materializes as demand for a broad range of domestic manufactures. These conditions have been important in several historical growth episodes.

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Income Distribution, Market Size, and Industrialization

Analyses of the role of rational speculators in financial markets usually presume that such investors dampen price fluctuations by trading against liquidity or noise traders. This conclusion does not necessarily hold when noise traders follow positive-feedback investment strategies buy when prices rise and sell when prices fall. In such cases, it may pay rational speculators to try to jump on the bandwagon early and to purchase ahead of noise trader demand. If rational speculators' attempts to jump on the bandwagon early trigger positive-feedback investment strategies, then an increase in the number of forward-looking rational speculators can lead to increased volatility of prices about fundamentals.

Positive Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation

The authors present a model of portfolio allocation by noise traders with incorrect expectations about return variances. For such misperceptions, noise traders who do not affect prices can earn higher expected returns than rational investors with similar risk aversion. Moreover, such noise traders can come to dominate the market in that the probability that they eventually have a high share of total wealth is close to one. Noise traders come to dominate despite their taking of excessive risk and their higher consumption. The authors conclude that the case against their long-run viability is not as clear-cut as is commonly supposed. Coauthors are Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann. Copyright 1991 by University of Chicago Press.

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Andrei Shleifer

Papers

Judicial Checks and Balances

Income Distribution, Market Size, and Industrialization

Positive Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation

The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial-Markets

Equilibrium Short Horizons of Investors and Firms