Research on the History of Corporate Governance and Law and Finance
“Law and Finance in Britain c. 1900,” , Financial History Review, 26-3 (December 2019): 267-293 (lead article in this issue) (With Christopher Coyle and John D. Turner).
All data in this paper:
Does the law and finance hypothesis pass the test of history? Business History 55, no. 3 (2013) (With John D. Turner).
Law and Finance c. 1900. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 16216, July 2010.
Laws versus Contracts: Legal Origins, Shareholder Protections, and Ownership Concentration in Brazil, 1890-1950, Business History Review 82-3 (Autumn 2008): 445-473
Drawing Links between Corporate Governance and Networks: Bankers in the Corporate Networks of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States circa 1910, Enterprises et Histoire 54-1 (2009): 16-36
Can Civil Law Countries Get Good Institutions? Lessons from the History of Creditor Rights and Bond Markets in Brazil, Journal of Economic History 68- 1 (March 2008): 80-108. *Winner of the Arthur H. Cole Prize for best paper in the Journal of Economic History, 2007-2008
Research on Banking
[Book] These Are the Good Old Days: Foreign Entry and the Mexican Banking System, book manuscript forthcoming in Spanish (Los Buenos Tiempos son Estos), Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, 2014. (with Stephen Haber)
Foreign Entry and the Mexican Banking System, 1997-2007. Economia (Fall 2012) (with Stephen Haber)
Bank Accounting Standards in Mexico. A Layman's Guide to Recent Changes and their English Equivalence (published in Spanish as "NORMAS CONTABLES BANCARIAS EN MEXICO. Una guiade los cambios para legos diez anos despues de la crisis bancaria de 1995.") Trimestre Economico 73, no. 4 (October/December 2006): 903-926 (With Gustavo Del Angel and Stephen Haber)
Research on Development Banking and Development Finance
The Role and Impact of Development Banks: A Review of their Founding, Focus and Influence, World Bank manuscript, November, 2016 (with Sergio Lazzarini, Pedro Makhoul, and Emily Simmons)
What Do State-Owned Development Banks Do? Evidence from BNDES, 2002-09. World Development 66 (February 2015) (with Sergio G. Lazzarini, Rodrigo Bandeira de Mello, and RosileneMarcon)
"Leviathan as a Minority Shareholder: Firm-level Implications of Equity Purchases by the State." Academy of Management Journal 56-6 (December 2013): 1775-1801. (With Carlos F. K. V. Inoue and Sergio G. Lazzarini.)
These Are the Good Old Days: Foreign Entry and the Mexican Banking System,
in Spanish (Los Buenos Tiempos son Estos), Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, 2014. (with Stephen Haber)
*Winner of the Best Book Prize of the Centro de Estudios Espinoza Yglesias 2014
Experiments in Financial Democracy
Cambridge University Press, 2009
In this book I challenge the law and finance literature and the idea that legal institutions are what determines the financial development of a country. I show how the founders of firms can create company bylaws with corporate governance arrangements that protect shareholders against the abuses of managers or the founders themselves, even when the law does not include such protections explicitly. That is, the protections for investors included in the bylaws of early Brazilian corporations explain, to a large extent, Brazil’s success in financing its first wave of industrialization (1882-1950). In particular, early Brazilian corporations included investor protections such as maximum vote provisions, which capped the number of votes a single shareholder could exercise during a shareholder meeting. That is, the founders of a firm would impose restrictions on their power in order to attract investors to finance the expansion of their business. I argue that corporate insiders provided such protections in Brazil to match the kind of protections British corporations afforded to investors at the time. Furthermore, my statistical analysis of the shareholder lists of nearly 100 Brazilian companies revealed a significant correlation between having such corporate statutes protecting small shareholders and having less concentrated ownership and control.
