Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. These findings echo Hayek's claims of the superiority of English to French legal institutions. In...

Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. These findings echo Hayek's claims of the superiority of English to French legal institutions. In...

The “legal origins” scholarship of the past decade has created controversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development. These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by...