This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

This study re-examines the theory of legal-origin on the basis of a new longitudinal dataset for four OECD countries (UK, USA, France and Germany) over a long time span 1970-2005. It observes that the civil law countries (France and Germany) provided better minority shareholder protection and...

The paper uses recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 28 developed and emerging economies to test whether the strengthening of share-holder rights in the course of the mid-1990s and 2000s promoted stock market development in those countries. It finds only weak...

We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 28 developed and emerging economies to test whether the strengthening of shareholder rights in the course of the mid-1990s and 2000s promoted stock market development in those countries. We find only weak and...