This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005, for four advanced countries, the UK, France, Germany and the USA. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis-whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny's Law and Finance, in particular its shareholder protection measures, have been heavily criticised from nearly every different standpoint, for example methodology, the choice of variables, the simplicity of the judgment or the disregard of board...