How different are common law and civil law legal systems? This question has occupied legal scholars for a long time. In the last 15 years the common law/civil law divide has also become a major theme in research of economics, finance and business. In many studies it is alleged that English legal...

The financial sector has faced a true regulatory avalanche since the financial crisis. The field of investor protection legislation has not escaped. This article takes a step back and structures the multitude of new rules with respect to investor protection – both at national and EU level –...

In view of the increasingly severe exploitation of minority shareholders and the existence of double agency costs in China, it is necessary to provide strong protection for minority shareholders in China in order to build an investor-friendly system. By enabling minority shareholders to prevent...

Minority shareholders in China face the risk of exploitation by both managers and majority shareholders. This is due to owner absence and concentrated ownership structures. In reducing these double agency costs, non-legal protection has a key role to play. Four market forces have been identified...

We are making available to all scholars a new dataset on legal protections of minority shareholder rights with repeated annual measures between 1970 and 2011 for 78 countries. Our measure synthesizes 10 different legal provisions contained in national legislation. The data can be used to analyze...

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center (SFIPC) in Taiwan in enforcing the duties of directors. To help shareholders or investors pursue a director for breach of company law or securities regulations, Taiwan created the SFIPC,...

A system of investor protection rests on a theory of which investors need protection. This chapter surveys the composition and perception of individual investors in American capital markets from 1900 to the present. The retail investor base has expanded remarkably during that time. Beyond the...

Studies have shown a gap between investors’ intentions and preferences on the one hand, and their actual behaviour on the other hand. This gap has been attributed to a perception of high volatility and less profitability in ESG investments, combined with a lack of knowledge and availability of...

On the premise that the expropriation of corporate assets by controlling shareholders would generate a residual loss, we studied how the laws of investor protection influenced on the decentralization of corporate ownership and what role the litigation cost play in this story by continuous time...

We develop a model to illustrate that controlling shareholders choose the level of investor protection that maximizes their own interests. Controlling shareholders in companies with complicated control structures can easily extract private benefits and are thus reluctant to enhance investor...