This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 970-2005 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...

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

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the...

The legal origins hypothesis is one of the most important and influential ideas to emerge in the social sciences in the past decade. However, the empirical base of the legal origins claim has always been contestable, as it largely consists of cross-sectional datasets which provide evidence on...