This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence...

This paper offers a first comprehensive analysis of legal change in shareholder and creditor rights protection in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. The paper uses the investor rights indices developed by La Porta et al. (1998) as a starting...

This paper explores how bank characteristics and the institutional environment influence the composition of banks’ loan portfolios. Using a new data set based on the recent EBRD Banking Environment and Performance Survey (BEPS), which was conducted in 2005 for 220 banks in 20 transition...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly communist countries coupled with detailed “hard” information about the...

The paper studies the extent of corporate leverage and range of excessive debt of Slovenian firms during the recent financial crisis. Half of all firms (of those with some non-zero debt and at least one employee) are found to face an unsustainable debt-to-EBITDA leverage ratio beyond 4,...