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

We assemble data on government ownership of banks around the world. The data show that such ownership is large and pervasive, and higher in countries with low levels of per capita income, backward financial systems, interventionist and inefficient governments, and poor protection of property rights. Higher government ownership of banks in 1970 is associated with slower subsequent financial development and lower growth of per capita income and productivity. This evidence supports “political” theories of the effects of government ownership of firms. THIS PAPER DISCUSSES A NEGLECTED ASPECT of financial systems of many countries: government ownership of banks. It shows that such ownership is pervasive around the world, and has had significant consequences for economic and financial development. There are two broad views of the government’s participation in financial markets. The first, basically optimistic, “development” view is associated with Alexander Gerschenkron ~1962!, who focuses on the necessity of financial development for economic growth. Gerschenkron argues that privately owned commercial banks have been the crucial vehicle of channeling savings into industry in several industrializing countries in the second half of the 19th century, especially Germany. However, in some countries—most conspicuously Russia—economic institutions were not sufficiently developed for private banks to play the crucial development role. “The scarcity of capital in Russia was such that no banking system could conceivably succeed in attracting sufficient funds to finance a large scale industrialization; the standards of honesty in business were so disastrously low, the general distrust of the public so great, that no bank could have hoped to attract even such small capital funds as were available, and no bank could have successfully engaged in long term credit policies in an economy where fraudulent bankruptcy had been almost elevated to the rank of a general business practice” ~Gerschenkron ~1962! ,p . 19 !. In such countries, the government could step in and, through its financial institutions, jump start both financial and eco

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Government Ownership of Banks

Several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society, and therefore of performance of social institutions. We argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations. In a cross-section of countries, evidence on government performance, participation in civic and professional societies, importance of large firms, and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis. Moreover, trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions, which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross-section of countries.

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Trust in Large Organizations

Are Financial Markets Efficient? Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets The Closed-End Fund Puzzle Professional Arbitrage A Model of Investor Sentiment Positive Feedback Investment Strategies Open Problems

Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance

We examine the effect of securities laws on stock market development in 49 countries. We find little evidence that public enforcement benefits stock markets, but strong evidence that laws mandating disclosure and facilitating private enforcement through liability rules benefit stock markets.

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What Works in Securities Laws

This paper explores Rosenstein-Rodman's (1943) idea that simultaneous industrialization of many sectors of the economy can be profitable for all of them, even when no sector can break even industrializing alone. We analyze this ides in the context of an imperfectly competitive economy with aggregate demand spillovers, and interpret the big push into industrialization as a move from a bad to a good equilibrium. We show that for two equilibria to exist, it must be the case that an industrializing firm raises the demand for products of other sectors through channels other than the contribution of its own profits to demand. For example, a firm paying high factory wages raises demand in other manufacturing sectors even if it loses money. In a similar vein, a firm investing today in order to produce at low cost tomorrow shifts income and hence demand for other goods into the future and so makes it more attractive for other firms also to invest today. Finally, an investing firm can benefit firms in other sectors if it uses a railroad or other shared infrastructure, and hence helps to defray the fixed cost of building the railroad. All these transmission mechanisms that help generate the big push seem to be of some relevance for less developed countries.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/nber_w2708.pdf?abstractid=259417&mirid=1

Andrei Shleifer

Papers

Government Ownership of Banks

Trust in Large Organizations

Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance

What Works in Securities Laws

Industrialization and the Big Push