This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

Corporate law in advanced domestic legal systems on the one hand, and typical treaties for the protection of foreign investment on the other hand, treat claims for damages by company shareholders differently. Advanced domestic systems generally bar shareholders from claiming for reflective loss...

This paper examines the extent to which differences in legal tradition, judicial efficiency, and investor protection affect debt financing and risk taking across developing economies. We find that firms in common law countries have the highest preference for debt financing while corporations in...

We review the governance role of private equity (PE) firms in companies that have experienced an LBO. We conjecture that PE firms may provide powerful remedies to agency conflicts associated with public and private firms, such as managerial entrenchment and opportunism

We examine the relationship between firm performance and corporate governance in microfinance institutions (MFI) using a self-constructed global dataset on MFIs collected from third-party rating agencies. Using random effects panel data estimations, we study the effects of board and CEO...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

Should boards of financial firms be blamed for the financial crisis' Using a large sample of data on nonfinancial and financial firms for the period 1996-2007, I document that the governance of financial firms is, on average, not obviously worse than in nonfinancial firms. Even the issue of...

Investor confidence in financial markets depends in large part on the existence of an accurate disclosure and reporting regime that provides transparency in the beneficial ownership and control structures of publicly listed companies. Today, a common post-financial crisis regulatory reform theme...