IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlawec/doi10.1086-712420.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?

Author

Listed:
  • Anu Bradford
  • Yun-chien Chang
  • Adam Chilton
  • Nuno Garoupa

Abstract

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly predicts whether countries have similar property regimes but does little to predict whether countries have similar antitrust regimes. Our results suggest that legal origin may be an important predictor of legal substance in well-established legal regimes but does little to explain substantive variation in more recent areas of law.

Suggested Citation

  • Anu Bradford & Yun-chien Chang & Adam Chilton & Nuno Garoupa, 2021. "Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 64(2), pages 207-231.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/712420
    DOI: 10.1086/712420
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/712420
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/712420
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/712420?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ding, Rong & Duan, Tinghua & Hou, Wenxuan & Liu, Xianda & Xu, Ziwei, 2022. "Do women drive corporate social responsibility? Evidence from gender diversity reforms around the world," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    2. Frensch, Richard & Horvath, Roman & Huber, Stephan, 2021. "Openness effects on the rule of law: Size and patterns of trade," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    3. Andrew Smith & Graham Brownlow, 2023. "Informal Institutions as Inhibitors of Rent-Seeking Entrepreneurship: Evidence From U.S. Legal History," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 47(6), pages 2323-2346, November.
    4. Per G. Fredriksson & Satyendra Kumar Gupta & Weihua Zhao & Jim R. Wollscheid, 2023. "Legal heritage and urban slums," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(1), pages 236-252, January.
    5. Barriola, Illan & Deffains, Bruno & Musy, Olivier, 2023. "Law and inequality: A comparative approach to the distributive implications of legal systems," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    6. Bertrand, Jérémie & Perrin, Caroline, 2022. "Girls Just Wanna Have Funds? The effect of women-friendly legislation on female-led firms’ access to credit," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    7. Cihan Artunç, 2024. "Legal origins of corporate governance: Choice of law in Egypt, 1887–1914," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 77(1), pages 3-40, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/712420. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.