An important tenet of a burgeoning 'law and finance' literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and...

This Article offers the first systematic attempt to measure the development of shareholder protection in the United States across time. Using three indices developed to measure the relative strength of shareholder protection across nations, we evaluate numerically the protections corporate and...