Rafael La Porta

TL;DR: 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 as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The authors examine the effect of securities laws on stock market development in 49 countries and 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.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies, making an effort to identify the ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms, and find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of the firms are widely held, in contrast to the Berle and Means image of ownership of the modern corporation.

TL;DR: This paper examined legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries and found that common law countries generally have the strongest, and french civil law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian countries located in the middle.

TL;DR: Botero et al. as discussed by the authors investigated the regulation of labor markets through employment, collective relations, and social security laws in 85 countries and found that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems, and that socialist, French and Scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries.