How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al, 1998,...

We study the restructuring process of small and medium-sized firms in financial distress. We have a unique dataset with firms in the Netherlands that are guided in their restructuring effort by banks. Part of our dataset consists of firms that successfully restructure their operations and...

Sovereign debts are often subject to payment suspension. Default, i.e. the financial incapacity to fulfil the debt service, and repudiation, i.e. the denial by a sovereign to recognize its legal obligations, are normally used to explain these payment suspensions. Intuitively, for bondholders,...

Sovereign bonds are usually priced under the assumption that only the sovereign issuer may be responsible of their repayment. In some cases however, bondholders may legitimately expect to be repaid by more than one agent. For example, when a country breaks-up, successor states may agree to...

Sovereign bonds are usually priced under the assumption that only the sovereign issuer may be responsible of their repayment. In some cases however, bondholders may legitimately expect to be repaid by more than one agent. For example, when a country breaks-up, successor states may agree to...

The objective of this paper is to provide a balanced assessment of international cooperation among financial regulators, with a focus on banking supervision. While recognizing the undeniable – and even unexpected – achievements of these regulators in building a cooperative framework for...

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...

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...

In the last few years law and finance scholars have 'discovered' the usefulness of comparative law. Their studies look at the quantifiable effect that legal rules and their enforcement have on financial development in different countries. Moreover, they link their results with the long- standing...

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...