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Legal Origin and Financial Development: New Evidence for Old Claims? The Creditor Rights Index Revisited

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Abstract

The "law and finance theory" predicts that the common law system provides the best basis for financial development and economic growth, followed by Scandinavian and German origin civil law and finally French origin civil law. This paper summarises the key points of the theory as well as a number of sceptical views. Moreover, it argues that the theory faces an identification problem, since the majority of common law countries have a market-based financial system, whereas the majority of civil law countries have a bank-based financial system. Furthermore, it is shown that one of the corner stones of the law and finance theory, its proposition that a common legal tradition implies a similar set of legal rules and procedure to protect financial investors, does not hold empirically. Last but not least, it is shown that recent additions to the theory's creditor right indicators data pool are eliminating the (weak) correspondence between business law and legal family that could be found in the original data set. Accordingly, the theory's claim that creditor protection is largely determined by the legal tradition of a particular country has to be reconsidered.

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  • Michael Graff, 2008. "Legal Origin and Financial Development: New Evidence for Old Claims? The Creditor Rights Index Revisited," KOF Working papers 08-197, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:08-197
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-005582287
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Legal Tradition; Creditor Rights;

    JEL classification:

    • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General
    • P00 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - General - - - General

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