For over a century, economists and policy makers have debated the relative merits of bank-based versus market-based financial systems. Recent research, however, argues that classifying countries as bank-based or market is not a very fruitful way to distinguish financial systems. This paper...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

This paper contributes to the literature on how a country's legal origin influences the operation of its financial system by using firm-level survey data on the obstacles that firms face in raising external finance. The paper assesses two channels through which legal origin may influence the...

This paper contributes to the literature on how a country's legal origin influences the operation of its financial system by using firm-level survey data on the obstacles that firms face in raising external finance. The paper assesses two channels through which legal origin may influence the...

This paper assesses empirically two theories of why legal origin influences financial development. The political channel stresses that legal traditions differ in the priority they give to the rights of individual investors vis-a-vis the state and this has repercussions for financial development....

A growing body of work suggests that cross-country differences in legal origin help explain differences in financial development. Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine assess two theories of why legal origin influences financial development. First, the "political" channel stresses that (1) legal...