Countries pursuing economic development confront a fundamental obstacle. Reforms that increase the size of the overall pie are blocked by powerful interests that are threatened by the growth-inducing changes. This problem is conspicuous in efforts to create effective capital markets to support...

A large legal and economic literature describes how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) suffer from a variety of agency and political problems. Less theory and evidence, however, have been generated about the reasons why state-owned enterprises listed in stock markets manage to attract investors to...

The growing recognition of the role of law in financial and economic development has generated significant disagreement about what determines the structure and content of legal institutions in the first place. Legal traditions and local politics have emerged in the literature as the most likely...

State ownership of publicly-traded corporations remains pervasive around the world, and has been increasing in recent years. Existing literature focuses on the implications of government ownership for corporate governance and performance at the firm level. This Article, by contrast, explores the...

The business corporation, a central pillar of modern capitalism, is deemed to have a set of defining features that are universal across different jurisdictions and ever more widely available. However, a close examination of legal developments in Brazil, one of the world's largest economies,...

Legal and economic scholarship views the provision of asset partitioning (the separation between the assets of the corporation and its shareholders) as the essential economic role of corporate personality. This Article contends that this view is incomplete. First, it identifies the provision of...

Despite predictions of their demise in the aftermath of the collapse of socialist economies in Eastern Europe, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are very much alive in the global economy. The relevance of listed SOEs — firms still subject to government ownership, a portion of whose shares are...

This Article reveals a clear, but thus far overlooked, pattern in the comparative law of contracts. The civil law places more limits on the scope of contractual obligations, whereas the common law more forcefully constrains the remedies available for breach of contract. It then offers two...

Conventional wisdom holds that economic analysis of law is either embryonic or nonexistent outside of the United States generally, and in civil law jurisdictions in particular. Existing explanations for the assumed lack of interest in the application of economic reasoning to legal problems range...