scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessPosted Content

Law and Finance

Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
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 best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors.
Abstract
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.

read more

Citations
More filters
ReportDOI

Financial Dependence and Growth

TL;DR: This paper examined whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms, and found that industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of foreign finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

TL;DR: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson as discussed by the authors used estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today, and they followed the lead of Curtin who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings.
Journal ArticleDOI

Investor Protection and Corporate Governance

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank-centered and market-centered financial systems, and discuss the possible origins of these differences, summarize their consequences, and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform.
BookDOI

Financial development and economic growth : views and agenda

TL;DR: The authors argued that the preponderance of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence suggests a positive first-order relationship between financial development and economic growth, and that financial development level is a good predictor of future rates of economic growth.
Journal ArticleDOI

Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions

TL;DR: This article showed that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure

TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw on recent progress in the theory of property rights, agency, and finance to develop a theory of ownership structure for the firm, which casts new light on and has implications for a variety of issues in the professional and popular literature.
Journal Article

The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of financial structure on market valuations has been investigated and a theory of investment of the firm under conditions of uncertainty has been developed for the cost-of-capital problem.
Journal ArticleDOI

Law and Finance

TL;DR: In this article, the authors 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-civil law countries located in the middle.
Book

The Modern Corporation and Private Property

TL;DR: Weidenbaum and Jensen as mentioned in this paper reviewed the impact of developments not fully anticipated by Berle and Means, such as the rise of the service sector, and the significant role played by institutional investors in the owner/manager equation.
Journal ArticleDOI

Legal Determinants of External Finance

TL;DR: The authors showed that countries with poorer investor protections, measured by both the character of legal rules and the quality of law enforcement, have smaller and narrower capital markets than those with stronger investor protections.
Related Papers (5)