Rafael La Porta

TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the evolution of legal rules between 1950 and 2000 and found that between the two simple disputes, the formalism of legal procedure did not converge, and possibly diverged, between common law and French civil law countries.

TL;DR: The anti-self-dealing index as discussed by the authors is a measure of legal protection of minority shareholders against expropriation by corporate insiders, which is calculated for 72 countries based on legal rules prevailing in 2003, and focuses on private enforcement mechanisms, such as disclosure, approval, and litigation, governing a specific selfdealing transaction.

TL;DR: The authors revisited several leading puzzles about the aggregate stock market by incorporating into a standard dividend discount model survey expectations of earnings of S&P 500 firms, while keeping discount rates constant, explains a significant part of stock price volatility, price-earnings ratio variation, and return predictability.

TL;DR: The authors found that the English institutions of judicial independence and checks and balances are strong predictors of economic freedom, but not of political freedom, and that judicial independence explains half of the positive effect of common law legal origin on measures of economic and political freedom.

TL;DR: This paper argued that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes, and they summarized this evidence and attempted a unified interpretation.