Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain - which for decades had separated East from West - most countries of Central and Eastern Europe are now members of the European Union; some have even adopted the euro. Nonetheless, these countries have also remained exceptionally vulnerable to...

This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal...

Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, which for decades had separated East from West, many countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are now members of the European Union and some have even adopted the Euro. Their readiness to open their borders to foreign capital and their faith...