The Impact of Investor Protection Law on Corporate Policy: Evidence from the Blue Sky Laws

Ashwini K. Agrawal

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Recent studies have debated the impact of investor protection laws on firms’ corporate policies. I exploit the passage of state investor protection statutes (“blue sky laws”) in the U.S. in the early 20th century to estimate the effects of investor protection law on firm financing decisions and investment activity. Regression estimates indicate that the passage of investor protection statutes causes firms to pay out greater dividends, issue more equity, and grow in size. The introduction of investor protection law is also associated with improvements in operating performance and market valuations. Additional analysis suggests that alternative hypotheses for the measured changes in corporate policy and performance have limited explanatory power. Overall, the evidence is strongly supportive of theoretical models which predict that investor protection laws have a significant impact on firm financing and investment policy.

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Investor Protection; Law and Finance; law; finance; empirical corporate finance; financial institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 G0 G30 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16351/1/MPRA_paper_16351.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:16351

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 ().