Legal origins theory suggests that law reform,strengthening shareholder and creditor rights, should enhance financial development. We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 25 developing, developed and transition countries to test this claim. We find that...

We use recently created longitudinal datasets measuring legal change over time to test whether the strengthening of shareholder and creditor rights leads to greater financial development. The hypothesis that law matters to financial development is rejected, both for a sample of 5 countries...

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

We test the ‘law matters’ and ‘legal origin’claims using a newly created panel dataset measuring 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...

A major purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poor governance or ‘state fragility’ in African countries on their overall economic and agrarian performance. The results of our econometric analysis show that a higher level of public security is conducive to lower levels of...

A major purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poor governance or ‘state fragility’ in African countries on their overall economic and agrarian performance. The results of our econometric analysis show that a higher level of public security is conducive to lower levels of...

Abstract In the 1980s, fifty years after the Great Depression industrial countries came again to be haunted with the spectre of mass unemployment. The unemployment situation, into the 1990s, continues to be dire in several European Union countries. Double digit unemployment rates are currently...

Although in the post-World War II period as a whole, developing countries have made substantial economic and industrial progress, during the last decade or so, many of them, particularly in Latin America and Africa, have been in an acute economic crisis . As a consequence, these countries have...

Abstract Two principal analytical and practical policy issues in economic development today are: a) the degree and kind of openness to the world economy a developing country should seek; b) what should the government do, or not do, in order to promote fast economic and industrial development....

Abstract In the first large-scale comparative studies of corporate financing patterns of large firms in leading developing countries (DCs), Singh and Hamid (1992) and Singh (1995) arrived at some rather surprising conclusions. This research showed that although there are variations in corporate...