We present a new measure of legal protection of minority shareholders against expropriation by corporate insiders: the anti-self-dealing index. Assembled with the help of Lex Mundi law firms, the index is calculated for 72 countries based on legal rules prevailing in 2003, and focuses on private...

In the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, judicial checks and balances are often seen as crucial guarantees of freedom. Hayek (1960) distinguishes two ways in which the judiciary provides such checks and balances: judicial independence and constitutional review. We create a new data base...

In the last decade, 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. We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified...

We present new data on the regulation of entry of start-up firms in 75 countries. The data set contains information on the number of procedures, official time, and official cost that a start-up must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...

Simeon Djankov et al. (2003) introduce a measure of the quality of contract enforcement -- the formalism of civil procedure -- for 109 countries as of 2000. For 40 of these countries, we compute procedural formalism every year since 1950. We find that large differences in procedural formalism...

In the United States, the two principal modes of producing local government services are in-house provision by government employees and contracting out to private suppliers, also known as privatization. We examine empirically how U.S. counties choose the mode of providing services. The evidence...

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause...

In cooperation with Lex Mundi member law firms in 109 countries, we measure and describe the exact procedures used by litigants and courts to evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent and to collect a bounced check. We use these data to construct an index of procedural formalism of dispute...

We present new data on the regulation of entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number of procedures, official time, and official cost that a start-up must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most countries. Countries with...

We assemble data on government ownership of banks around the world. The data show that such ownership is large and pervasive, and higher in countries with low levels of per capita income, backward financial systems, interventionist and inefficient governments, and poor protection of property...