In this article we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. This quantification of legal rules ("leximetrics") provides interesting possibilities for comparing variations across time series and across legal systems. For instance, our study finds, that in all of our panel countries shareholder protection 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 shareholder protection is taking place since 1993 and is increasing since 2001. Finally, our examination of the legal differences between the five countries does not confirm the distinction between common law and civil law countries.

Using a panel data set covering a range of developed and developing countries, we show that common-law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil-law ones in the period 1995-2005. However, civilian systems were catching up, suggesting that legal origin was not much of an obstacle to formal convergence in shareholder protection law. We find no evidence of a positive impact of these legal changes on stock market development. Possible explanations are that laws have been overly protective of shareholders and that transplanted laws have not worked well in contexts for which they were not suited.

Using a newly-created data set which measures legal change over time, the authors present evidence on the evolution of labour law in France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their analysis casts light on the claim that "legal origin" affects the content of labour law regimes. While some divergence between common law and civil law countries is found at the aggregate level, a more complex picture emerges from consideration of specific areas of labour law. The authors discuss the potential significance of this relatively new measurement-based approach to understanding the forces that shape the evolution of labour law.