This article suggests a shift in how we think about agency. The essential function of agency law lies not in enabling the delegation of authority, as is widely suggested, but more significantly in its effect on creditors' rights through asset partitioning. Most of what agency law does in...

Economists have documented pervasive correlations between legal origins, modern regulation, and economic outcomes around the world. Where legal origin is exogenous, however, it is almost perfectly correlated with another set of potentially relevant background variables: the colonial policies of...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common law and civil law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common and civil law countries in the complexity,...