This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the qual-ity of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common-law countries generally have the strongest, and French-civil-law countries the weakest, legal

for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning. Our civilization has always recognized exceptional individuals, whose performance in sports, the arts, and science is vastly superior

in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households.

Indicators of the development of the financial sector do not improve monotonically over time. In particular, we find that by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels. This pattern cannot be explained by structural theories that attribute cross-country differences in financial development to time-invariant factors, such as a country's legal origin or culture. We propose an "interest group" theory of financial development where incumbents oppose financial development because it breeds competition. The theory predicts that incumbents' opposition will be weaker when an economy allows both cross-border trade and capital flows. This theory can go some way in accounting for the cross-country differences and the time series variation of financial development. When we recognize that different kinds of institutional heritages afford different scope for private interests to express themselves, we obtain a...

This paper presents evidence that “social capital ” matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies. Memberships in formal groups—Putnam’s measure of social capital—is not associated with trust or with improved economic performance. We find trust and civic norms are stronger in nations with higher and more equal incomes, with institutions that restrain predatory actions of chief executives, and with better-educated and ethnically homogeneous populations. I.

Recent research on corporate governance has documented large differences between countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms, in the breadth and depth of financial markets, and in the access of firms to external finance. We suggest that there is a common element to the explanations of these differences, namely how well investors, both shareholders and creditors, are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms. We describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries, summarize the consequences of these differences, and suggest potential strategies of reform of corporate governance. We argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank-centered and market-centered financial systems.

This article examines the fundamental

The semantic structure of texts can be described both at the local microlevel and at a more global macrolevel. A model for text comprehension based on this notion accounts for the formation of a coherent semantic text base in terms of a cyclical process constrained by limitations of working memory. Furthermore, the model includes macro-operators, whose purpose is to reduce the information in a text base to its gist, that is, the theoretical macrostructure. These opera-tions are under the control of a schema, which is a theoretical formulation of the comprehender's goals. The macroprocesses are predictable only when the control schema can be made explicit. On the production side, the model is con-cerned with the generation of recall and summarization protocols. This process is partly reproductive and partly constructive, involving the inverse operation of the macro-operators. The model is applied to a paragraph from a psycho-logical research report, and methods for the empirical testing of the model are developed. The main goal of this article is to describe the system of mental operations that underlie the processes occurring in text comprehension and in the production of recall and summariza-tion protocols. A processing model will be outlined that specifies three sets of operations. First, the meaning elements of a text become

In response to the proposition that communication lacks disciplinary sta-tus because of deficient core knowledge, I propose that we turn an osten-sible weakness into a strength. We should identify our mission as bring-ing together insights and theories that would otherwise remain scattered in other disciplines. Because of the lack of interchange among the disci-plines, hypotheses thoroughly discredited in one field may receive wide acceptance in another. Potential research paradigms remain fractured, with pieces here and there but no comprehensive statement to guide re-search. By bringing ideas together in one location, communication can aspire to become a master discipline that synthesizes related theories and concepts and exposes them to the most rigorous, comprehensive state-ment and exploration. Reaching this goal would require a more self-con-scious determination by communication scholars to plumb other fields and feed back their studies to outside researchers. At the same time, such an enterprise would enhance the theoretical rigor of communication

The transformation of society through broad-based