TY  - JOUR
AU  - Porta,Rafael La
AU  - Lopez-de-Silane,Florencio
AU  - Shleifer,Andrei
AU  - Vishny,Robert W.
TI  - Law and Finance
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5661
PY  - 1996
Y2  - July 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5661
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5661.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rafael La Porta
Dartmouth College
Tuck School
210 Tuck Hall
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-3739
E-Mail: rafael.laporta@dartmouth.edu

Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes
EDHEC Business School
393, Promenade des Anglais BP 3116
06202 Nice Cedex 3
France
Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 07
Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 41
E-Mail: Florencio.lopezdesilanes@edhec.edu

Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu

Robert W. Vishny
Booth School of Business
The University of Chicago
5807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-2522
Fax: 773/834-1920
E-Mail: Rvishny@gmail.com
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1996-11-01
AB  - This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries.  The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian civil law countries located in the middle.  We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified shareholders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.
ER  -