In the late nineteenth century Britain had almost no mandatory shareholder protections, but had very developed financial markets. We argue that private contracting between shareholders and corporations meant that the absence of statutory protections was immaterial. Using circa 500 articles of...

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

‘Shareholder rights' are the legal entitlements of shareholders via-a-vis companies in which they invest. A large body of research has sought to investigate how shareholder rights foster accountability of controllers. The concern has been that without accountability, managers and dominant...

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...

This article examines some of the institutional conditions that facilitated the development of equity markets in Brazil. A critical factor was the addition of protections for investors to corporate bylaws, which enabled relatively large corporations in Brazil to attract investors in large...

This paper shows that agency problems result from controlling-minority shareholder conflicts have a nonlinear causal relation with firm cash holding, and this relation hinges critically on the strength of investor protection. Using a direct measure of controlling shareholder's entrenchment...

Using a 2004 Chinese securities regulation that requires equity offering proposals to obtain the separate approval of voting minority shareholders, we examine whether giving minority shareholders increased control over corporate decisions helps reduce value-decreasing corporate decisions for...

Law and Finance theory stresses the importance of shareholder rights for the reliability and development of capital markets. Many European Parliaments picked up this corporate governance issue. We expand the analysis of Lele and Siems (2007) and show that the number of shareholder rights grew...

Western economists have argued that the legal environment for the protection of minority shareholders and mechanisms for restricting the expropriation of minority shareholders will be important in determining the size and extent of a country's capital markets. In China, the protection of...