Judges and legal aid lawyers have been the slowest segments of the legal profession to adopt technology innovations. Interestingly, another commonality between them is that neither segment needs to impress current clients or do marketing to keep fully employed. For legal aid lawyers, the number...

This paper studies the transition of contract enforcement institutions. The prevalence of relational contracts, low legal quality, strong cultural preference for personalistic relationships, low social mobility, and highly unequal endowment form a cluster of mutually reinforcing institutions...

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the importance of the environment in Central and Eastern Europe Countries (CEE) in the general context of current social, economic and political reforms since the early 1990s and, more precisely, to examine the extent to which these emerging democracies...

The paper discusses some major lessons to be learnt from the application of bankruptcy law in a post-communist environment. Its focus is on East Central Europe because elsewhere bankruptcy law is of rather limited practical relevance. The incentives and the selection of trustees turn out to be...

This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid centralplanning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We empirically examine the relationship between financial...

This paper explores evolutionary process of legal concept and theory in Burma. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the issues that Burma will face in legal transformation. Since its independence, the post-colonial governments have failed to transform legal system in accordance with the...

This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal...

The lack of effective judiciary in post-socialist countries has been a pervasive concern and successful judicial reform an elusive goal. Yet to date, little empirical research exists on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world. We draw on a new court-level panel dataset from...