IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v120y2005i1p223-246..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Legal Enforcement Affect Financial Transactions? The Contractual Channel in Private Equity

Author

Listed:
  • Josh Lerner
  • Antoinette Schoar

Abstract

Analyzing 210 developing country private equity investments, we find that transactions vary with nations' legal enforcement, whether measured directly or through legal origin. Investments in high enforcement and common law nations often use convertible preferred stock with covenants. In low enforcement and civil law nations, private equity groups tend to use common stock and debt, and rely on equity and board control. Transactions in high enforcement countries have higher valuations and returns. While relying on ownership rather than contractual provisions may help to alleviate legal enforcement problems, these results suggest that private solutions are only a partial remedy.

Suggested Citation

  • Josh Lerner & Antoinette Schoar, 2005. "Does Legal Enforcement Affect Financial Transactions? The Contractual Channel in Private Equity," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(1), pages 223-246.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:120:y:2005:i:1:p:223-246.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/0033553053327443
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

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

    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:oup:qjecon:v:120:y:2005:i:1:p:223-246.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    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.