USC Marshall

Legal origin cannot explain economic growth. Although common law countries have experienced higher growth rates since 1960, this advantage disappears when one controls for the dominant pre-independence colonial power or for human capital in 1960. Legal origin and colonial history are strongly correlated. Nearly all common law countries are former English colonies, and nearly all civil law countries were colonized by France, Spain or Portugal. Therefore, unless one controls for other aspects of colonial policy – such as education – differences between countries are likely to be misattributed to differences in their legal systems. In addition, the process of colonization was not random. Apparent differences in the economic performance of former colonies may be explicable as effects of initial geographic and climatic conditions.

This paper surveys the first generation CRSP papers authored by Larry Fisher in the 1960's. It is part of a memorial issue of the Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting devoted to Larry Fisher

Only in 1931 was the California Corporate Code revised to provide for limited liability. In earlier work I found that this move had no detectable effect on shareholder wealth. In this article I examine the potential beneficiaries of this change with an eye toward finding out who wanted this change. Using this historical example we can shed light on a number of issues including: (1) the economic impact of limited liability; (2) the role of lawyers, especially lawyers of high prestige, in determining the law; and (3) the competition or lack thereof among states in designing their corporate codes.