The legal rules governing businesses' organizational choices have varied across nations along two main dimensions: the number of different forms that businesses can adopt; and the extent to which businesses have the contractual freedom to modify the available forms to suit their needs. Until the...

We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe’s civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...