Shareholder, Creditor and Worker Protection: Time Series Evidence about the Differences between French, German, Indian, UK and US Law

Abstract

This paper uses a new quantitative methodology (numerical comparative law, leximetrics) in order to answer the questions of whether there has been convergence, divergence or persistence of for shareholder, creditor, and worker protection, and how this development relates to the Common Law/Civil Law distinction. It is based on new indices which code the legal development of France, Germany, India, the UK and the US from 1970 to 2005. The main result is that one has to distinguish between different areas of law: the laws have converged in shareholder protection, they have diverged in worker protection and in creditor protection converging and diverging trends even out. These results do not depend on the distinction between Civil Law and Common Law countries, because there have been a number of instances where countries of different legal families have converged and countries of the same legal family have diverged.A revised version of this paper was published under the title Convergence in Corporate Governance: A Leximetric Approach, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1444860.