For twenty-five years, the US and Japanese goverments have seen the rise of corporate groups in Japan, Keiretsu, as due in part to foreign pressure to liberalize the Japanese market. In fact, virtually all of the recent works that discuss barriers in a historical context argue that Japanese...

We present data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies, making an effort to identify ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms. We find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of these firms are widely-held, in...

We present new data on the regulation of entry of start-up firms in 75 countries. The data set contains information on the number of procedures, official time, and official cost that a start-up must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the "dynamic vitality" of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

We analyse the role of debt in persuading an entrepreneur to pay out cash flows, rather than to divert them. In the first part of the paper we study the optimal debt contract -- specifically, the trade-off between the size of the loan and the repayment -- under the assumption that some debt...