This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 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...

The past decade has seen intense academic debates over possible explanations for the different systems of corporate ownership and control that exist in developed economies. Yet the role of bankruptcy as a mechanism of corporate governance has received relatively little attention. Furthermore,...

A number of recent national and EU initiatives have sought explicitly to encourage innovative firms and venture capital finance. In keeping with the policy debate, this paper focuses explicitly on the role of law and lawyers in facilitating venture capital: that is, both supply by investors, and...

The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law...