Using a sample of 49 countries, La Porta et al. show that countries whose legal rules originate in the common-law tradition tend to protect investors considerably more than the countries whose legal rules originate in the civil-law, and especially the French-civil-law tradition, with the...

The “legal origins” scholarship of the past decade has created controversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development. These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by...

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origins of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal...

While scholars have hypothesized about the sources of variation in property rights for over 2500years, it is only very recently that researchers have begun to test these theories empirically. Thispaper reviews both the theory and empirical evidence supporting and refuting the law andendowment...

Legal Origin Theory is applied to Reform China's legal system in order to create a development model for a national legal system influenced by multiple legal families. Utilizing an extensive literature review and assessment of national laws affecting property rights, the model depicts how a...

Effective property rights protection plays a fundamental role in promoting economic performance. Yet measurement problems make the relationship between property rights and entrepreneurship an ambiguous issue. As an advancement on previous research in this paper we propose a new approach to the...