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...

We study a broad sample of firms across 32 countries and find that strong shareholder protections and better access to stock market financing lead to substantially higher long-run rates of R&D investment, particularly in small firms, but are unimportant for fixed capital investment. Credit...

(VF)Cet article propose d’évaluer les relations entre les réformes en matière de gouvernance d’entreprise et la réorganisation du système financier en France. L’objectif est de discuter la thèse selon laquelle il existe une relation forte et stable entre tradition juridique, niveau...

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...

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...

The industrial organization of developing countries is characterized by the pervasive use of subcontracting arrangements among small, financially constrained firms. This paper asks whether vertical integration relaxes those financial constraints. It shows that vertical integration trades off the...

The leximetric research on shareholder protection can contribute to core questions of comparative company law. For example, such research may be able to show whether or not there is a trend to increase shareholder power across countries. It can also provide us with tools to confirm or challenge...

We investigate the empirical relation between competition and corporate governance and the effect of country characteristics on this relation. We find that competition is associated with strong corporate governance, but only in less developed countries. We next examine the impact of corporate...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...