How does Investors' Legal Protection affect Productivity and Growth?

Binyamin Berdugo () and Sharon Hadad

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper analyzes the implications of investors' legal protection on aggregate productivity and growth. We have two main results. First, that better investors' legal protection can mitigate agency problems between investors and innovators and therefore expand the range of high-tech projects that can be financed by non-bank investors. Second, investors' legal protection shifts investment resources from less productive (medium-tech) to highly productive (high-tech) projects and therefore enhances economic growth. These results stem from two forces. On one hand, private investors' moral hazard problems (in which entrepreneurs shift investors' resources to their own benefit), and on the other hand innovators' risk of project termination by banks due to wrong signals about projects' probability of success. Our results are consistent with recent empirical studies that show a high correlation between legal investors' protection and the structure of the financial system as well as the economic performance at industry and macroeconomic levels.

Keywords: Banks; private investors protection; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 G10 G33 G38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-05-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-fdg and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15496/1/MPRA_paper_15496.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:15496

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().