The paper presents the actual ownership structure of public companies in Bulgaria on the basis of a survey of 104 companies traded on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange. It also discusses the problems of disclosure of ownership information, focussing on the transposition of the EC Large Holdings...

This paper investigates the governance structure choices of firms when there is competition between legal systems. We study the impact of the allocation of control over choice of governance and reincorporation on firms’ technologies and technological specialization of countries in the...

We study how deregulation of corporate law affects the decision of entrepreneurs of where to incorporate. Recent rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have enabled entrepreneurs to select their country of incorporation independently of their real seat. We analyze foreign incorporations...

Legal positions (such as rights, duties, liberties, powers, liabilities and immunities) are linked together by strong institutional complementarities that differ from the usual institutional complementarities that have been recently considered in economic literature. Legal positions not only...

During popular prime-time television shows, forensic investigators use specialized but wide-ranging scientific knowledge of chemical trace evidence, bacteria, DNA, teeth, insects, and other specialties to collect and sift evidence of possible crimes. In economics and finance, forensic...

Leniency programs have shown to be an important tool to fight cartels. By reducing fees or guaranteeing imunity against criminal prosecution, leniency programs provide incentives to cartelized firms to reveal the cartel activities. We reveal the recent literature on leniency programs as well as...

This paper presents a political economy model where there is mutual feedback between investor protection and stock market development. Better investor protection induces companies to issue more equity and thereby leads to a broader stock market. In turn, equity issuance expands the shareholder...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

Stock market development has been an important part of financial liberalisation in the less developed countries (LDCs). In the pro-liberalisation circle, stock market is assigned to play an important role in the capitalist development of the LDCs. This is also true for the liberalisation regime...

The U.S. system of security law was designed more than 70 years ago to regain investors’ trust after a major financial crisis. Today we face a similar problem. But while in the 1930s the prevailing perception was that investors had been defrauded by offerings of dubious quality securities, in...