Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection seem to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this...

We develop a model predicting two channels through which creditor protection enhances the performance of stock prices: (1) The probability of a liquidity crisis leading to a binding investment-finance constraint falls with a strong protection of creditors; (1) The stock prices under the...