The World Bank reports « Doing business » (2004, 2005 and 2006), referring to the main assumptions and findings of the « law and finance » theory, predict that the common law system provides better basis for financial development and economic growth than French origin civil law. This paper...

This paper belongs to the growing body of the ?Law and finance) literature based on timeseries study. It carries out an empirical investigation of the role of corporate governance in financial development. We focus on French corporate governance reforms in order to examine whether these reforms...

Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

In recent years there have been two parallel discussions taking place in the US and in the UK about the role which institutional shareholders should play in governing the corporation. In the US this discussion is around the idea of shareholder empowerment, in the UK it is around shareholder...

Corporate law and corporate governance are often called upon to address problems in international and transnational contexts. Financial markets are global and the problems in those markets are often similar, if not identical, even though the capital market structure across jurisdictions differs...

This essay presents my educational philosophy for the teaching of business associations, corporate governance, energy, entrepreneurship, ethics, finance and capital markets, law, leadership, management, securities law, strategy, and venture capital. Any treatment of this topic can easily span...

In the last dozen years, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country’s laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. Much of this research has dealt with rules...

Based on 412 control transactions between 1990 and 2000 we construct a measure of the private benefits of control in 39 countries. We find that the value of control ranges between –4% and +65%, with an average of 14%. As predicted by theory, in countries where private benefits of control are...

Using a dataset of Chinese judicial opinions arising in over fifty cases, this paper analyses the development and current implementation of shareholder derivative actions in the courts of the People's Republic of China (“PRC”), both before and after the derivative lawsuit was explicitly...

We are making available to all scholars a new dataset on legal protections of minority shareholder rights with repeated annual measures between 1970 and 2011 for 78 countries. Our measure synthesizes 10 different legal provisions contained in national legislation. The data can be used to analyze...