Legal Traditions, Legal Reforms and Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence

1. Introduction

2. Revisiting the Legal Origins Hypothesis: A Brief Review of the Literature

2.1 The Legal Origins View

2.2. Arguments Based on Colonialism and the Distribution of Legal Traditions around

the World

2.3. Arguments based on Political Economy

2.4. Arguments based on Measurement and Recoding of Legal Data

2.5 Recapitulation

3. Data Description

3.1 Legal and Regulatory Indicators

3.2 Economic and Financial Outcomes

4. Literature Review on the Effect of the Ease of Doing Business on Economic and

Financial Outcomes

4.2 Research on Getting Credit and Information Disclosure

4.3 Research on Contract Enforcement

4.4 Research on Resolving Insolvency

4.5 Research on Starting a Business

4.6 Research

4.7 Research on Dealing with Construction Permits

4.8 Research on Paying Taxes

5. Legal Change within Legal Traditions and Convergence

5.1. Has There Been Legal Change over the period 2006-2014?

5.2. Have Legal Reforms Reduced the Differences in Legal Rules/regulations across

Legal Traditions?

5.3. Has There Been Convergence in Legal and Regulatory Standards among Legal

Traditions over the Period 2006-2014?

5.4. More on Convergence: Robustness Checks

6.1. The Effect of Legal Rules and Regulations on Economic and Financial Performance

6.2. Distinguishing the Circumstances under Which the Effect Takes Place

6.2.1 Differentiating by Level of Development

6.2.2 Differentiating by Institution

6.2.3 Differentiating by Legal Tradition

6.2.4 Interacting Legal and Regulatory Indicators with the Level of Development

6.3. Graphical Analysis of the Relationship between Legal Change and Financial and

Economic Development

7. Sensitivity Analyses on the Effect of Legal Rules Variation on Economic and

Financial Performance

7.1. Using Alternative Legal Indicators

7.2. Using Alternative Panel Estimations: Difference and System GMM Estimators

7.3. General Discussion

8. The Effectiveness of Legal Reforms and the Gap between Law on the Books and

the Reality on the Ground

Analysis

8.2. Gap between Law on the Books and the Reality on the Ground

8.3. Gap between Law on the Books and Law in Action

8.4 Summary of Results

9. Conclusions