In this article we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. This quantification of legal rules (“leximetricsâ€) provides interesting possibilities for comparing variations across time series...

Following the 1900 congress in Paris, the beginning of the 20th century saw comparative law emerge as a significant discipline. This paper suggests that the early 21st century is seeing the decline, or maybe even the 'end', of comparative law. In contrast to other claims which see the 21st...

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

This book analyses the complex relationship between corporate governance and economic development by focusing on the reform of corporate governance, the role of the legal system, and the interconnections with the financial system.

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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the financial risks posed by energy and environmental markets and how these risks are addressed by current regulatory regimes and legislation. This assessment should be of interest to academics, practitioners, regulators and policymakers....

We present evidence on the evolution of labour law in five countries (the UK, USA, Germany, France and India) using a newly-created dataset which measures legal change over time. The results cast light on the claim that legal origin, or the influence of common law and civil law regulatory...

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...