La théorie juridico-financière revisitée

Depuis qu'elle a été lancée par La Porta et autres, la théorie juridico-financière (Law and Finance) suscite de vifs débats. Dans un article récent intitulé Law and Finance Revisited, Holger Spamann remet en cause l'indice développé par La Porta et autres et, du même coup, leurs résultats. Voici le résumé de SSRN:

The "Antidirector Rights Index" from La Porta et al.'s "Law and Finance" (1998) has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in almost 100 published studies. With articles by legal scholars questioning the accuracy of index values for several countries, I undertake a systematic study to verify these values for 46 countries with the help of local lawyers. My emphasis is on accuracy of the data; I do not change the original variable definitions. The study leads to a substantial revision: 33 of the 46 observations need to be corrected, and the correlation of corrected and original values is only .53. With accurate values, the well-known results of La Porta et al. (1997, 1998) no longer hold: accurate index values are neither distributed with significant differences between Common and Civil Law countries nor correlated with stock market size and ownership dispersion. All of the many results derived with the index will have to be revisited.

Il est intéressant de mettre cette étude en contraste avec celle que nous avons menée, Yves Bozec, Claude Laurin et moi-même, et qui sera publiée sous peu dans le International Review of Law and Economics. Notre étude, ayant un titre similaire, Law of Incorporation and Ownership Structure: The Law and Finance Theory Revisited, mène à des résultats différents, tout en vérifiant implicitement la valeur de l'indice de La Porta. Voici notre résumé de SSRN:

The theory of law and finance proposed by La Porta et al. (1998) predicts that minority controlled ownership structures, i.e. the structures that allow voting rights to exceed cash-flow rights, are more frequent in legal contexts where investors are not well protected against the expropriation attempts orchestrated by controlling shareholders. The purpose of our study is to test this prediction in a unique environment, that of the province of Quebec. Quebec's distinct status hinges on the fact that it is a Civil Law jurisdiction in a country, Canada, which is made up of nine other provinces with a Common Law tradition. Overall, the results support the theory. Quebec's Civil Law tradition appears to lead to a greater concentration of voting rights and a wider separation between voting rights and ownership rights.

Le débat n'est donc pas terminé. Parions qu'il sera bien présent lors des prochaines Journées Maximilien-Caron organisées sous le thème Convergence, concurrence et harmonisation des systèmes juridiques. Le colloque aura lieu le 25 avril à la Faculté de droit de l'Université de Montréal.