What Works in Securities Laws?
V. Conclusion
What Works in Securities Laws? 27 capital—a survey measure of trust among strangers—is available for 27 of our countries and is always insignificant.13
Finally, it is possible that governments adopt better securities laws in coun-tries with buoyant financial markets (Cheffins (2001, 2003), Coffee (2001)).
This argument is undermined by the systematic differences in investor pro-tection across legal origins. Reverse causality is also undermined by the fact that the dimensions of the law that are expensive to implement—for example, having an independent and focused regulator—do not seem to matter. On the contrary, what matters is legal rules that are cheap rather than expensive to introduce. A second reverse causality argument holds that regulators swarm toward large securities markets because there are bigger rents to secure from regulating them. This argument is also undermined by the fact that it is pre-cisely the regulations that render the regulators unimportant, namely, those that facilitate private contracting and that have the tightest association with stock market development.
We can partially address endogeneity problems using instrumental variables.
In practice, legal origin is the only suitable instrument, but we have several legal variables that inf luence stock market development. To get around this problem, we replace disclosure, liability standards, and anti-director rights with the principal component of these three variables, which we call investor pro-tection. This principal component accounts for roughly 70% of the variation in disclosure, liability standards, and anti-director rights. Table VI presents the two-stage least squares results using common law as an instrument. Investor protection is statistically significant for all seven proxies of stock market devel-opment (Panel A). Moreover, legal origin is a strong predictor of investor protec-tion (Panel B).14These results should partially mitigate endogeneity concerns.
28 The Journal of Finance
an independent and/or focused regulator or criminal sanctions, do not matter, and others matter in only some regressions. In contrast, both extensive disclo-sure requirements and standards of liability facilitating investor recovery of losses are associated with larger stock markets. Our results on the benefits of disclosure support similar findings of Barth, Caprio, and Levine (2003), who find that their proxy for private monitoring is positively correlated with the size of the banking sector.
These results point to the importance of regulating the agency conf lict be-tween controlling shareholders and outside investors to further the develop-ment of capital markets. They also point to the need for legal reform to support financial development, and cast doubt on the sufficiency of purely private so-lutions in bridging the gap between countries with strong and weak investor protection. Finally, our findings further clarify why legal origin predicts stock market development. The results support the view that the benefit of common law in this area comes from its emphasis on market discipline and private lit-igation. The benefits of common law appear to lie in its emphasis on private contracting and standardized disclosure and in its reliance on private dispute resolution using market-friendly standards of liability.
Four 153
WhatWorksinSecuritiesLaws?29
Appendix Table of Correlations
This appendix shows the correlations among the variables used in the paper. All variables are described in Table I.
Disclosure Liability Supervisor Rule-making Investigative Criminal Public Anti-Directors Efficiencyof LnGDP UKLegal FrenchLegal GermanLegal Scandinavian Market Domestic Block Accessto Ownership
requirements standards characteristics power Orders Power sanctions enforcement rights thejudiciary percapita Origin Origin Origin LegalOrigin capitalization firms IPOs premia equity concentration
Liability standards
0.5496a
Supervisor characteristics
−0.1099 0.0481
Rule-making power
0.0196 −0.0427 −0.0149
Orders 0.3847a 0.4082b 0.1399 0.2837b Investigative
power
0.3759a 0.3100b 0.2142 0.3465b 0.5750a
Criminal sanctions
0.3121b 0.2184 −0.0053 −0.0778 0.3208b−0.0292
Public enforcement
0.3305b 0.3091b 0.3821a 0.6179a 0.8067a 0.7575a 0.3193b
Anti-directors rights
0.5236a 0.4999a 0.0559 0.0177 0.4129a 0.3554b 0.2811c 0.3691a
Efficiency of the judiciary
0.2542c 0.2241−0.3128b−0.2600c 0.2215 −0.1588 0.2038 −0.1130 0.2113
Ln GDP per capita
0.1378 0.1805−0.2821b−0.1798 0.0263 −0.1263 0.0489 −0.1709 0.0349 0.6618a
English Legal Origin
0.5902a 0.3369b 0.0878 0.0058 0.3548b 0.3091b 0.4212a 0.3687a 0.5890a 0.1826 −0.1967
French Legal Origin
−0.5509a−0.2830b 0.2297 0.2384c−0.1322 0.1054 −0.3393b 0.0639 −0.4463a−0.4742a−0.1815 −0.6599a
German Legal Origin
0.0005 −0.0687 −0.2267 −0.2771c−0.3175b−0.4259a−0.1237 −0.4719a−0.1925 0.1611 0.3078b−0.2846b−0.3235b
Scandinavian Legal Origin
−0.0440 0.0006−0.2983b−0.1094 −0.0057 −0.2247 0.0198 −0.1996 0.0001 0.3428b 0.3059b−0.2272 −0.2582c−0.1114
Market capitalization
0.5412a 0.5046a−0.1773 0.0885 0.3030b 0.0691 0.2447c 0.1869 0.3909a 0.5771a 0.5646a 0.2041 −0.4058a 0.1828 0.1552
Domestic firms 0.4596a 0.4152a−0.1876 −0.2464c 0.3378b 0.1476 0.2209 0.0805 0.3598b 0.7454a 0.6760a 0.2681c−0.4770a 0.1084 0.2602c 0.6315a IPOs 0.4372a 0.4241a−0.1209 0.0637 0.2813c 0.0037 0.4162a 0.2021 0.2459c 0.3960a 0.5426a 0.1795 −0.3407b 0.2181 0.0387 0.7144a 0.5664a Block premia −0.5845a−0.4523a−0.1100 0.1326 −0.1658 −0.1439 −0.2334 −0.1309 −0.4662a−0.3103c−0.2586 −0.3209c 0.3936b 0.0592 −0.2258−0.5334a−0.5058a−0.4641a Access to equity 0.5173a 0.4802a−0.1462 −0.2757c 0.2103 −0.0425 0.1891 −0.0443 0.2659c 0.6234a 0.5498a 0.3401b−0.5624a 0.1121 0.2892c 0.6727a 0.6985a 0.5139a−0.5942a Ownership
concentration
−0.5005a−0.4159a 0.1634 0.0535 −0.1080 −0.0335 −0.0147 0.0093 −0.4024a−0.4301a−0.4243a−0.1572 0.5163a−0.3526b−0.2343−0.5623a−0.4267a−0.4743a 0.4993a−0.5390a Liquidity 0.4154a 0.4404a−0.0647 0.0968 0.1028 −0.0287 0.2766c 0.1187 0.2165 0.2829b 0.4390a 0.0269 −0.3233b 0.4180a 0.0365 0.7571a 0.4329a 0.6967a−0.3944b 0.4736a−0.5297a asignificant at 1%;bsignificant at 5%; andcsignificant at 10%.
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THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE•VOL. LIX, NO. 1•FEBRUARY 2004