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 …