Since reaching a peak in 1997, the number of listed firms in the U.S. has fallen in every year but one. During this same period, public firms have been net purchasers of $3.6 trillion of equity (in 2015 dollars) rather than net issuers. The propensity to be listed is lower across all firm size...

We consider a dynamic economy populated by heterogeneous firms subject to generic capital frictions: adjustment costs, taxes and financing constraints. A random subset of firms in this economy receives an empirical "treatment", which modifies the parameters governing these frictions. An...

Religions have little to say about shareholders but have much to say about creditors. We find that the origin of a country's legal system is more important than its religion and language in explaining shareholder rights. However, a country's principal religion helps predict the cross-sectional...

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified...

We investigate the extent to which perceived quality of judicial institutions has an impact on individuals' propensity for criminal and dishonest behavior and on their views regarding the acceptability of dishonesty and law-breaking. We use micro data on residents of 25 European countries and...

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal...

While scholars have hypothesized about the sources of variation in property rights for over 2500years, it is only very recently that researchers have begun to test these theories empirically. Thispaper reviews both the theory and empirical evidence supporting and refuting the law andendowment...

We provide an autopsy of the patterns of corporate control and ownership concentration in a dataset covering more than 40,000 listed firms from 127 countries over 2004−2012. Employing a plethora of original and secondary sources, big data techniques, and applying the Shapley-Shubik algorithm...