Legal Determinants of External Finance Revisited: The Inverse Relationship Between Investor Protection and Societal Well-Being

David Collison (), Stuart Cross (), John Ferguson (), David Power () and Lorna Stevenson ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2012, vol. 108, issue 3, 393-410

Abstract: This article investigates relationships between countries’ legal traditions and their quality of life as measured by a number of widely reported social indicators; in so doing it also offers a critique of a highly influential body of work which is widely cited in the literatures of corporate governance, economics and finance. That body of work has shown, inter alia, statistically significant relationships between legal traditions and various proxies for investor protection. We show statistically significant relationships between legal traditions and various proxies for societal health. Our comparative evidence suggests that the interests of investors are not congruent with the interests of wider society, and that the criteria for judging the effectiveness of approaches to corporate governance should be broadened. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Keywords: Legal traditions; Social indicators; Social accounting; Investor protection; Corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-011-1098-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:108:y:2012:i:3:p:393-410

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-1098-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().