We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...

We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe's civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...

This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had...

We investigate whether and to what extent multiple encompassing tests may help determine weights for forecast averaging in a standard vector autoregressive setting. To this end we consider a new test-based procedure, which assigns non-zero weights to candidate models that add information not...

In a recent series of articles, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny have argued that countries whose legal systems are based on civil law (especially of French origin) have systematically weaker environments for business than those whose legal...

Today the vast majority of multi-owner firms in the United States are corporations, but that was not the case in the past. Before the advent of the income tax, tort litigation, and significant federal regulation, entrepreneurs more often than not chose to organize as partnerships, a form that...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...