We test the ‘law matters’ and ‘legal origin’claims using a newly created panel dataset measuring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic...

Comparative law and finance quantifies differences in the laws governing the business enterprise in various countries. The resulting data can be used to test which legal institutions (if any) matter for financial development. Until recently only cross-sectional data were available. We report the...

n today's world, the transfer of laws and regulations between different legal systems is commonplace. The global spread of stewardship codes in recent years presents a promising, but yet untested, terrain to explore the diffusion of such norms. This paper aims to fill this gap. Employing the...

In this paper we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. At-tributing and comparing legal differences by numbers is contrary to the tradi-tional way of doing comparative law and the use of a...

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This paper shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...

Law and finance scholars have increasingly relied upon comparative law in the last few years. The work of these scholars has considered, in empirical terms, the effect that legal rules and their enforcement have on financial development in different countries. These studies have routinely...

In 2005 the European Union adopted a Directive on Cross-Border Mergers, which Member States have to implement until 15 December 2007. This Directive is not only interesting for European lawyers because it addresses general problems of cross-border mergers and could therefore also become an...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quantitative methodology to law ('leximetrics', 'numerical comparative law'). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...