What motivates investors to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of U.S. listed foreign firms? We analyze the investment allocation decision of actively-managed emerging market mutual fund managers. Although legal provisions are typically assumed to affect ADR and its underlying domestic shares equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of legal...

There is a fundamental trade-off between protecting property rights and enhancing reliance on contracts when intermediaries have the opportunity to transfer goods without the owner’s consent. If buyers value the good more than original owners, protection of property misallocates value. Instead, enhancing the buyers’ reliance on contracts causes misallocation if owners have the higher valuation....

This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal indices to capture a range of potential conflicts between different stakeholders of the firm. It supplem...

We show that efficient exchange obtains independently of the degree to which a legal system protects the rights of owners. We study a number of different legal rules, including property rules (strong protection), liability rules (any party can take the owner’s asset but must pay a legally-determined compensation), and even rules that protect the owner’s interests very weakly (liability rules wi...

Background: Collecting data in the form of databases is one of the new methods that has been growing with the advancement of information technology. The use of databases in management and policy-making has created challenges in areas such as privacy breaches and compliance with accepted ethical norms. The increasing use of databases in public and private organizations in Iran has introduced new...

Indigenous knowledge of underdeveloped countries or of underdeveloped peoples within developed or developing nations is a sought after commodity in today’s marketplace. These commercialisation pressures will increase in the globalised climate of the new-world economic order. Since knowledge is intangible, legal protection of intangible knowledge is minimal. However, when the knowledge is expres...

Citation: Mooers, A. L.R. Prugh, M. Festa-Bianchet, and J.A. Hutchings 2007 [Internet] Biases in Legal Listing under Canadian Endangered Species Legislation. Conservation Biology Volume 21, No. 3, 572–575 Summary/ Abstract: In many countries wild species can be granted legal protection when they are deemed at risk of extinction or extirpation. Protection is the first step in a process of recove...

The first panel explores the diverse set of legal issues and risks that arise as governments increasingly adopt open source systems. Governments are attracted to open source software systems by the potential cost savings, open standards and protocols, and the flexibility, adaptability and reliability of the systems. However, there are serious legal issues and liabilities that can arise when gov...