In this paper we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. At-tributing and comparing legal differences by numbers is contrary to the tradi-tional way of doing comparative law and the use of a...

Hostile takeovers are commonly thought to play a key role in rendering managers accountable to dispersed shareholders in the "Anglo-American" system of corporate governance. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the very significant differences in takeover regulation between the two...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...

Mid-September 2008 saw governments around the world initiating emergency regulatory action to ban short selling. Short selling is a practice that has existed for many years and is regarded as a valuable activity to aid price discovery by the market. If regulatory action by securities regulators...

This article explores how speculative bubbles undermine the effectiveness of securities regulations and spawn epidemics of securities fraud. A brief historical survey demonstrates that stock market bubbles almost invariably coincide with epidemics of securities fraud, and provides a compelling...

This paper uses a natural experiment to measure market response to the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Because SOX applies to all US public companies, US-based studies have difficulty separating the effects of contemporaneous events. However, controlled analysis is available: SOX...

During the course of the nineteenth century, many countries abolished debtors' prisons and imposed legal limits on borrowers' maximum liability. The same period saw the emergence of equity warrants. This paper shows how limited liability rules make warrants a critical part of firms' capital...

Hostile takeovers are commonly thought to play a key role in rendering managers accountable to dispersed shareholders in the Anglo-American system of corporate governance. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the very significant differences in takeover regulation between the two...

The present Anglo-American system of corporate control is said to be a random result of market forces, the strong influence of which resulted from a weak state, and undefined principles in the state's economic policy until the 1930s. In contrast, in Continental Europe, strong states with a...