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...

We compare the resumption of convertibility into gold by the United States in 1879 and Britain in 1925 to ascertain the degree to which the outcomes reflected differences in strategies adopted by the authorities or in the external environment. It is concluded that external factors were the most...

In this paper we argue that adherence to the gold standard rule of convertibility of national currencies into a fixed weight of gold served as a `good housekeeping seal of approval' which facilitated access by peripheral countries to foreign capital from the core countries of western Europe. We...