Legal Determinants of External Finance

Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silane, Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny

NBER Working Paper No. 5879
Issued in January 1997
NBER Program(s):   CF

Using a sample of 49 countries, we show that countries with poorer investor protections, measured by both the character of legal rules and the quality of law enforcement, have smaller and narrower capital markets. These findings apply to both equity and debt markets. In particular, French civil law countries have both the weakest investor protections and the least developed capital markets, especially as compared to common law countries.

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Published: Journal of Finance, Vol. 52, no. 3 (1997): 1131-1150.

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