The "law and finance theory" predicts that the common law system provides the best basis for financial development and economic growth, followed by Scandinavian and German origin civil law and finally French origin civil law. This paper summarises the key points of the theory as well as a number...

This paper describes tests of several hypotheses put forward in the literature on the significance of education as a determinant of economic development. It is shown that the generally positive impact of education on economic development is severely impaired by 'educational imbalance' in the...

The "law and finance theory" predicts that the common law system provides the best basis for financial development and economic growth, followed by Scandinavian and German origin civil law and finally French origin civil law. Referring to a number of sceptical views, this paper argues that the...

This paper addresses the notion of an "optimum level of financial activity" that is contingent on a country's general level of development. Referring to threshold regressions and a bootstrap test for structural shift of the finance regressor in a growth equation, it is shown that countries gain...

The "law and finance theory" is an ambitious and fascinating attempt to combine insights from the theory of corporate finance, institutional economics, legal and economic history as well as the recent studies on the determinants of economic growth into an encompassing theory, thereby filling...