Shareholder Protection around the World ("Leximetric II")

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder protection has improved in the last years; that developed countries perform better than developing countries in protecting shareholders; that shareholder protection in common law countries is relatively similar whereas there is no comparable similarity within the Ger-man and French civil law families; that German corporate law is "more main-stream" and US corporate law is "more eccentric" than the law of the other countries; and that in general there has been convergence in the last decade. In order to explain these results, the distinction between origin and transplant countries can be useful. However, in contrast to previous studies, this does not mean that all depends on the distinction between English, French and German origin and transplant countries. Rather it is decisive (a) which "version" of the corporate law the transplant country copied, (b) whether transplant countries continue to take developments in the origin countries into account and (c) whether transplant countries have left the path of their (former) origin countries.