Shareholder Protection: A Leximetric Approach

In this paper we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. At-tributing and comparing legal differences by numbers is contrary to the tradi-tional way of doing comparative law and the use of a quantitative methodology to account for variations across legal systems has been subjected to some searching criticisms. However, we believe that with a cautious approach, it has the potential to open new vistas of research in the area of comparative law and as such should not be shunned. This paper provides an illustration of the inter-esting possibilities that diligent quantification of legal rules ('leximetrics') pro-vides for comparing variations across time series and across legal systems. For instance, our study finds, that in all of our panel countries shareholder protec-tion has been improving in the last three decades; that the protection of minority against majority shareholders is considerably stronger in 'blockholder countries' as compared to the non-blockholder countries and that convergence in share-holder protection is taking place since 1993 and is increasing since 2001. Fi-nally, our examination of the legal differences between the five countries does not confirm the distinction between common law and civil law countries.Shareholder protection, leximetrics, numerical comparative law, law and fi-nance, La Porta et al., LLSV, coding, comparative company law, comparative corporate law, comparative corporate governance, legal origins, legal development, convergence

Law, Finance, and Politics: The Case of India

The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law jurisdiction-plays an important part in determining the development of its investor protection regulations, and consequently its financial development. An alternative theory claims that the determinants of investor protection are political, rather than legal. We use the case of India to test these theories. We find little support for the idea that India's legal heritage as a common law country has been influential in speeding the path of regulatory reforms and financial development. There is a complementarity between (i) India's relative success in services and software, (ii) the relative strength of its financial markets for outside equity, as opposed to outside debt, and (iii) the relative success of stock market regulation, as opposed to reforms of creditor rights. We conclude that political explanations have more traction in explaining the case of India than do theories based on 'legal origins'.India, Law and Finance, Investor Protection, Economic structure and financial structure

Diversity in Shareholder Protection in Common Law Countries

Aktionär, Anlegerschutz, Common Law, Shareholders, Investor protection

MUC4 overexpression augments cell migration and metastasis through EGFR family proteins in triple negative breast cancer cells.

INTRODUCTION: Current studies indicate that triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive breast cancer subtype, is associated with poor prognosis and an early pattern of metastasis. Emerging evidence suggests that MUC4 mucin is associated with metastasis of various cancers, including breast cancer. However, the functional role of MUC4 remains unclear in breast cancers, especially in TNBCs. METHOD: In the present study, we investigated the functional and mechanistic roles of MUC4 in potentiating pathogenic signals including EGFR family proteins to promote TNBC aggressiveness using in vitro and in vivo studies. Further, we studied the expression of MUC4 in invasive TNBC tissue and normal breast tissue by immunostaining. RESULTS: MUC4 promotes proliferation, anchorage-dependent and-independent growth of TNBC cells, augments TNBC cell migratory and invasive potential in vitro, and enhances tumorigenicity and metastasis in vivo. In addition, our studies demonstrated that MUC4 up-regulates the EGFR family of proteins, and augments downstream Erk1/2, PKC-γ, and FAK mediated oncogenic signaling. Moreover, our studies also showed that knockdown of MUC4 in TNBC cells induced molecular changes suggestive of mesenchymal to epithelial transition. We also demonstrated in this study, for the first time, that knockdown of MUC4 was associated with reduced expression of EGFR and ErbB3 (EGFR family proteins) in TNBC cells, suggesting that MUC4 uses an alternative to ErbB2 mechanism to promote aggressiveness. We further demonstrate that MUC4 is differentially over-expressed in invasive TNBC tissues compared to normal breast tissue. CONCLUSIONS: MUC4 mucin expression is associated with TNBC pathobiology, and its knockdown reduced aggressiveness in vitro, and tumorigenesis and metastasis in vivo. Overall, our findings suggest that MUC4 mucin promotes invasive activities of TNBC cells by altering the expression of EGFR, ErbB2, and ErbB3 molecules and their downstream signaling

Guided tissue regeneration in communicating periodontal and endodontic lesions – A hope for the hopeless!

The use of guided tissue regeneration (GTR) has become a standard of care in Periodontology. GTR using membrane barriers and/or bone grafting materials has also been used in periapical surgery. However, the application of the GTR principle, particularly in communicating endodontic-periodontal lesions with loss of the buccal cortical plate, is a very challenging task, with very few reported human clinical studies. An interdisciplinary approach, combining endodontic and periodontal (surgical) procedures can save a tooth in the long run that has been defined as hopeless at the preliminary stage of treatment

How Do Legal Rules Evolve? Evidence from a Cross-Country Comparison of Shareholder, Creditor and Worker Protection

Much attention has been devoted in recent literature to the claim that a country's "legal origin" may make a difference to its pattern of financial development and more generally to its economic growth path. Proponents of this view assert that the "family" within which a country's legal system originated—be it common law, or one of the varieties of civil law—has a significant impact upon the quality of its legal protection of shareholders, which in turn impacts upon economic growth, through the channel of firms' access to external finance. Complementary studies of creditors' rights and labor regulation have buttressed the core claim that different legal families have different dynamic properties. Specifically, common law systems are thought to be better able to respond to the changing needs of a market economy than are civilian systems. This literature has, however, largely been based upon cross-sectional studies of the quality of corporate, insolvency, and labor law at particular points in the late 1990s. In this paper, we report findings based on newly constructed indices which track legal change over time in the areas of shareholder, creditor, and worker protection. The indices cover five systems for the period 1970-2005: three "parent" systems, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany; the world's most developed economy, the United States; and its largest democracy, India. The results cast doubt on the legal origin hypothesis in so far as they show that civil law systems have seen substantial increases in shareholder protection over the period in question. The pattern of change differs depending on the area which is being examined, with the law on creditor and worker protection demonstrating more divergence and heterogeneity than that relating to shareholders. The results for worker protection are more consistent with the legal origin claim than in the other two cases, but this overall result conceals significant diversity within the two "legal families," with different countries relying on different institutional mechanisms to regulate labor. Until the late 1980s, the law of the five countries was diverging, but in the last ten to fifteen years there has been some convergence, particularly in relation to shareholder protection