Legal Origin or Colonial History?

Endogenous legal traditions and economic outcomes

“…107 and p. 660). 17 Klerman et al (2011) highlight that Japan and Turkey were never colonized and borrowed from the European codes considered most advanced at the time their initial institutions selecting those fitting the most their culture. A similar process interested Bulgaria, China, Greece, Romania, and Taiwan ( David, 1995 ).…”

“…23 Consistent withKlerman et al (2011) , legal traditions have no significant impact on the GDP per capita in 1995 and the ratio of investment to GDP averaged between 1990 and 1999 (see the Internet appendix).…”

“…The papers most closely related to mine explore the idea that legal origins could be merely a proxy for other factors influencing legal rules and outcomes, like culture ( Licht et al, 2005 ), history ( Rajan and Zingales, 2003;Sgard, 2006 ), political institutions ( Pagano and Volpin, 2005;Acemoglu and Johnson, 2005;Perotti and Von Thadden, 2006 ), and colonial policies ( Klerman et al, 2011 ). 1 None of these contributions however considers the endogeneity of legal traditions and the methodological challenges related to the measurement of legal institutions and different types of outcomes.…”

Empirical analysis of legal institutions and institutional change: multiple-methods approaches and their application to corporate governance research

“…The claim that legal infrastructure is completely exogenous to the economy is also doubtful. Two-way causal flows can be expected not only in the case of 'parent' systems, whose institutions are presumably, within the terms of legal origins theory itself, endogenous to their own economic developmental path (Deakin and Pistor, 2012), but also in the many instances of countries consciously borrowing or adapting legal institutions from other systems, as opposed to having them imposed upon them from outside (Klerman et al, 2011).…”

Judicial Independence in the EU A Puzzle

“…Based on this observation, one could expect that a specific group of countries with a shared legal origin is driving the negative association between de jure and de facto JI in the European Union. Klerman et al (2011) to distinguish between French legal origin, German/Scandinavian legal origin, and a small residual group of common law and mixed legal origin. For the EU, we find exactly the opposite of the expected pattern.…”