The present study analysed time series data of 37 developed and less developed countries over the period 1976-2002. It shows that in the majority of cases (including France, UK and USA) the stock market turnover ratio - an important indicator of stock market development- has no positive...

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970--2005, for four advanced countries, the UK, France, Germany and the USA. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis--whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

This paper uses a new time series dataset of shareholder protection consisting of 60 annual legal indicators for the period 1970-2005 for France, Germany, the UK and the US. On the basis of these data it examines developments in shareholder protection and reassesses the claims that common-law...

This paper extends recent works on the relationship between the distribution of income and growth in demand-constrained industrial economies in a two-sector framework incorporating the industry-agriculture demand linkages typical of many LDCs. It argues that the issue of income distribution...

In a classical world where prices of both northern manufactures and southern raw materials are determined by market demand and supply, technical progress in one region leads to a terms-of-trade improvement of the other region irrespective of whether technical progress is labor-saving or...

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic...

The essence of the legal origin hypothesis is that a country with an English legal origin provides better investor and creditor protection and experiences greater financial development; financial institutions and stock markets flourish, the general public participate more in financing investment...

Using a panel dataset covering a range of developed and developing countries, we show that common law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil law ones in the period 1995-2005. However, civilian systems were catching up, suggesting that civil law origin was not much of an...