Insolvency practitioners from 88 countries describe how debt enforcement will proceed against an identical hotel about to default on its debt. We use the data on time, cost, and the likely disposition of the assets (preservation as a going concern vs. piecemeal sale) to construct a measure of...

We present a new measure of legal protection of minority shareholders against expropriation by corporate insiders: the anti-self-dealing index. Assembled with the help of Lex Mundi law firms, the index is calculated for 72 countries based on legal rules prevailing in 2003, and focuses on private...

We collect data on the rules and practices of financial and conflict disclosure by members of Parliament in 175 countries. Although two-thirds of the countries have some disclosure laws, less than one-third make disclosures available to the public, and less than one-sixth of potentially useful...

Previous research has interpreted the correlation between per capita income and civil war as evidence that poverty is a main determinant of conflict. In this paper, we find that the relationship between poverty and civil war is spurious and is accounted for by historical phenomena that jointly...

Services trade reform matters, but what is Doha doing about it? It has been hard to judge because of the opaqueness of services policies and the opaqueness of the request-offer negotiating process. This paper attempts to assess what is on the table. It presents the results of the first survey of...

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO's valuable role in restraining protectionism. What is on the table would...

The institutions of bankruptcy have been at the center of the great economic events of the last decade, ranging from the Asian economic crisis, to the transition from socialism to capitalism. Our understanding of the economic, and legal structure of these institutions, as well as of their impact...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is today dealing with an issue that lies at the interface of two major challenges the world faces, trade liberalization and international migration. Greater freedom for the "temporary movement of individual service suppliers" is being negotiated under the...

We present new data on the regulation of entry of start-up firms in 75 countries. The data set contains information on the number of procedures, official time, and official cost that a start-up must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...