This article disentangles the incentive and entrenchment effects of large ownership. Using data for 1,301 publicly traded corporations in eight East Asian economies, we find that firm value increases with the cash-flow ownership of the largest shareholder, consistent with a positive incentive effect. But firm value falls when the control rights of the largest shareholder exceed its cash-flow ownership, consistent with an entrenchment effect. Given that concentrated corporate ownership is predominant in most countries, these findings have relevance for corporate governance across the world. THE EFFECTS OF OWNERSHIP STRUCTURES

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We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment, collective relations, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems, and that socialist, French, and Scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries. However, the effects of legal origins are larger, and explain more of the variation in regulations, than those of politics. Heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment, especially of the young. These results are most naturally consistent with legal theories, according to which countries have pervasive regulatory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems.* Yale University, World Bank, Harvard University, Yale University, and Harvard University, respectively. This research was supported by the World Bank, the Gildor Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the International Institute for Corporate Governance at Yale University. We appreciate helpful comments from Daron Acemoglu, Gary Becker, Olivier Blanchard, Simon Deakin, Richard Freeman, Edward Glaeser, Peter Gourevitch, Simon Johnson, Lawrence Katz, Casey Mulligan, Mark Roe, Christopher Woodruff, and anonymous referees. We also want to thank Patricio Amador, Jose Caballero, Benjamin Chen, Ronald Chen, Eugenio De Bellard, Gabriela Enrigue, Manuel Garcia-Huitron, Eidelman Gonzalez, Magdalena Lopez-Morton, Camila Madrinan, Christian Pfirrmann, Alejandro Ponce-Rodriguez, Kumar Rakhi, Damian Rozo, David Stewart, Franco Tapia and Deniz Yavuz, for excellent research assistance The complete data set and descriptions of all variables at the country level can be found at

respectively. They would like to thank Eugenio de Bellard, Melissa Johns and Nikolay Naumovich for their outstanding help with collecting and analyzing the data. The vews presented in this paper do not reflect those of the World Bank or of Lex Mundi. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We investigate cross-country determinants of private credit, using new data on legal creditor rights and private and public credit registries in 129 countries. We find that both creditor protection through the legal system and information sharing institutions are associated with higher ratios of private credit to GDP, but that the former is relatively more important in the richer countries. An analysis of legal reforms also shows that improvements in creditor rights and in information sharing precede faster credit growth. We also find that creditor rights are extremely stable over time, contrary to the convergence hypothesis. Finally, we find that legal origins are an important determinant of both creditor rights and information sharing institutions.

In cooperation with Lex Mundi member law firms in 109 countries, we measure and describe the exact procedures used by litigants and courts to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent and to collect a bounced check. We use these data to construct an index of procedural formalism of dispute resolution for each country. We find that such formalism is systematically greater in civil than in common law countries. Moreover, procedural formalism is associated with higher expected duration of judicial proceedings, more corruption, less consistency, less honesty, less fairness in judicial decisions, and inferior access to justice. These results suggest that legal transplantation may have led to an inefficiently high level of procedural formalism, particularly in developing countries.