The authors examine how well several institutional and firm-level factors and their interactions explain firms' perceptions of property rights protection. Their sample includes private and public firms that vary in size from very small to large in 62 countries. Together, the institutional...

We examine how well several institutional- and firm-level factors explain firms' perceptions of property rights protection. The institutional theories we investigate account for approximately 50% of the country-level variation, indicating that current research addresses first-order factors....

Using a sample of 49 countries, La Porta et al. show that countries whose legal rules originate in the common-law tradition tend to protect investors considerably more than the countries whose legal rules originate in the civil-law, and especially the French-civil-law tradition, with the...