Law and politics had a significant impact on stock market development in Germany between 1870 and the beginning of World War II. IPOs can be a bellwether for stock market development and nearly 1100 were carried out on the Berlin Stock Exchange during this period. Regulatory changes occurring in...

Britain has a reputation for having a stock market-oriented corporate economy and there is an extensive literature maintaining that laws affording substantial protection to outside investors are needed for a thriving stock market. Historically, however, UK equity markets have not always...

We revisit debates on the regulation of IPOs by analyzing failure rates of IPOs carried out between 1900 and 1913 on the London and Berlin stock exchanges, two of the leading financial markets during the early 20th century. IPOs were regulated more heavily in Germany than in Britain and, as...

In Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot deduced that no single culprit was responsible for a murder on the eponymous train. In this article, which is intended to serve as an aide memoire to assess anticipated reforms, we similarly reason that there is no single suspect...

Outside directors of public companies play a central role in overseeing management. Nonetheless, they have rarely incurred personal, out-of-pocket liability for failing to carry out their assigned tasks, either in the litigation-prone United States or other countries. Historically, as threats to...

IIt is often assumed that strong securities markets require good legal protection of minority shareholders. This implies both quot;goodquot; law -- principally corporate and securities law -- and enforcement, yet there has been little empirical analysis of enforcement. We study private...

Logically, in a corporate governance system where big companies are widely held and control over corporate policymaking is delegated to a cohort of full-time executives, there needs to be quot;goodquot; managers. Still, the relevant literature has had little to say about this variable. This...

Settlements reached in 2005 in securities litigation involving Enron and WorldCom highlighted the financial risks faced by outside directors of public companies. We argue elsewhere that Enron and WorldCom, as instances where directors made damages payments out of their own pockets, are and...

Influential contributors to debates concerning corporate governance assert that it is impossible to understand key trends without taking politics into account. This proposition has, however, remained largely untested. This paper therefore offers an empirical study of the relation between...