Coase Vs Coasians

COASE VERSUS THE COASIANS*
EDWARD GLAESER
SIMON JOHNSON
ANDREI SHLEIFER
Who should enforce laws or contracts: judges or regulators? Many Coasians,

though not Coase himself, advocate judicial enforcement. We show that the incen-
tives facing judges and regulators crucially shape this choice. We then compare the
regulation of nancial markets in Poland and the Czech Republic in the 1990s. In
Poland, strict enforcement of the securities law by a highly motivated regulator was
associated with a rapidly developing stock market. In the Czech Republic, hands-off
regulation was associated with a moribund stock market.
I. INTRODUCTION
At the heart of economists’ traditional skepticism about gov-
ernment regulation is the Coase theorem [Coase 1960]. The
theorem states that when property rights are well dened and
“transaction costs” are zero, market participants will organize
their transactions in ways that achieve efcient outcomes. When
they can do so, it is not necessary for the government to engage in
“corrective” actions through taxes, regulations, or even legal
rules. Financial markets are often used to demonstrate the Coase
theorem’s case against regulation. Advocates of the regulation of
these markets point to a variety of potential failures, such as the
ability of security issuers to “expropriate” both potential and exist-
ing investors through misrepresentation or prot diversion. Inves-
tors’ fear of such expropriation prevents rms from raising external
funds, and keeps efcient projects from being undertaken.
Not so, reply the Coasians. They point out that most securi-
ties transactions take place between sophisticated adults, and
that both the buyers and the issuers of securities have available
to them a vast range of private arrangements to achieve ef-
ciency, including contracts such as corporate charters, certica-
tion by intermediaries, and various forms of bonding. Such con-
tracts render most laws and regulations unnecessary [Stigler
1964; Easterbrook and Fischel 1991].
* We thank Alberto Alesina, Simeon Djankov, Oliver Hart, Louis Kaplow,

Lawrence Katz, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Gerry McDermott,
Randall Morck, Raghuram Rajan, Mark Ramseyer, Steven Shavell, Peter Temin,
and three anonymous referees for helpful comments and the National Science
Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship
Center for nancial support.
©2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2001
853
854 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
On the face of it, the Coasians’ argument is powerful. Yet it

crucially relies, among other assumptions, on the possibility of
effective judicial enforcement of complicated contracts. Judges
must be able, and more importantly willing, to read complicated
contracts, verify whether the events triggering particular clauses
have actually occurred, and interpret broad and ambiguous lan-
guage. These requirements on the judges apply as strongly to the
judicial enforcement of laws, where the interpretation and appli-
cation of particular statutes requires signicant investment. In
reality, courts in many countries are undernanced, unmoti-
vated, unclear as to how the law applies, unfamiliar with eco-
nomic issues, or even corrupt. Such courts cannot be expected to
engage in costly verication of the facts of difcult cases or
contingencies of complicated contracts. Indeed, even when con-
tracts are restricted by statutes, the courts may not have the
resources or incentives to verify whether or how particular stat-
utes apply.
Financial contracting illustrates these problems. When is the
information that a rm’s manager fails to disclose to shareholders
“material,” and hence has to be disclosed because of a statute or
a contract? When does a corporation “abuse” minority sharehold-
ers, as opposed to just following the managers’ best “business
judgment?” When does a broker fail to engage in “honest trading”
in executing customer orders? When does a manager trade on
“inside information” rather than simply happen to be lucky? The
interpretation of the contracts or statutes involving such terms is
expensive, and requires powerful incentives to motivate an adju-
dicator to invest in understanding the case. Absent such incen-
tives, courts often postpone decisions, or simply let go the poten-
tial violators of rules and contracts.
An alternative strategy is the enforcement of legal rules by
regulators as opposed to judges. In our view, the crucial distinc-
tion between judges and regulators is that the latter can be more
easily provided with incentives to punish violations of particular
statutes.1 Judges, in contrast, are by design more independent
and therefore harder to motivate. The stronger incentives of the
regulators have the benet of bringing about more aggressive
enforcement than can be achieved through courts. Yet these
1. The classic reference on the incentive of law enforcers is Becker and Stigler
[1974], to whose work we return below. A recent survey of public enforcement of
law by Polinsky and Shavell [2000] scarcely pays attention to the incentives of the
enforcers.
COASE VERSUS THE COASIANS 855
incentives also have the potential cost of excessively aggressive

enforcement when regulators motivated to nd violations penal-
ize innocent suspects. There is thus a trade-off between enforce-
ment by judges facing relatively weak but unbiased incentives
and enforcement by regulators facing stronger but possibly biased
incentives.2
We present a theoretical model that sheds light on this trade-
off, and identies the circumstances under which enforcement by
judges or regulators is preferred. The model shows that, relative
to judges, regulators may be better motivated to invest in under-
standing the laws and circumstances of a case, but also more
likely—if overmotivated—to reach politically desirable decisions
at the expense of doing justice. The model also shows how reduc-
ing the costs of the investment in information by law enforcers
can improve enforcement efciency.
We then illustrate the model by comparing the regulation of
securities markets through corporate and securities laws in Po-
land, the Czech Republic, and to a lesser extent Hungary. In
these transition economies, nancial regulation was designed
essentially from scratch, and hence we can compare both the
designs of laws and regulations and their consequences. The
model bears in particular on the design of securities laws, since
these laws shape the incentives of market regulators as well as
the costs of information acquisition by the enforcers.
We show that, in its securities law, Poland adopted a more
stringent regulatory stance than did the Czech Republic. This
difference was reected not just in the general philosophies of
regulation, but in the statutes and the mechanisms of law en-
forcement. In contrast to the Czech Republic, Poland adopted
legal rules highly protective of investors, mandated extensive
information disclosure by securities issuers and intermediaries,
and created an independent and highly motivated regulator to
enforce the rules. We nd that this approach to regulation in
Poland has stimulated rapid development of securities markets,
and enabled a number of rms to raise external funds. The
expropriation of investors has been relatively modest. In contrast,
the lax regulations in the Czech Republic, enforced by an unmo-
tivated ofce in the nance ministry, have been associated with
2. Coase [1988, pp. 117–118] recognized that regulation may be preferred to

judicially enforced contracts as a method of regulating some types of conduct:
“There is no reason why, on occasion, such governmental regulation should not be
an improvement on economic efciency.”
security delistings and a notable absence of equity nance

through a public market by either new or existing rms. Expro-
priation of investors has been rampant, and has acquired a new
Czech-specic name, tunneling [Coffee 1996, 1998, 1999; Pistor
1999; Johnson et al. 2000b]. Starting in 1996, the Czech govern-
ment tightened its regulations. Hungary adopted an intermediate
regulatory stance, and has shown an intermediate level of nan-
cial development.
II. A M ODEL OF ENFORCEMENT INCENTIVES
A. Basic Model
We consider a situation in which the government wishes to
punish particular conduct creating negative externalities, such as
nondisclosure of material information by a manager or “market
manipulation” by a broker. This task is assigned to an enforce-
ment ofcial (an adjudicator). The question we address is whether
the government wants this adjudicator to be a judge or a regula-
tor. In the case of a judge, we focus on the inquisitorial legal
system of civil law countries, where the judge must himself un-
dertake an investigation into the facts of the situation and the
law. The model we present focuses on the case where there is a
legal rule or law that restricts certain conduct. The question of
who should adjudicate, however, equally well applies to a situa-
tion in which two private parties such as an investor and a broker
contractually agree on their conduct and have a dispute on
whether this contract was followed.
Our general assumption is that the society does not have full
control over the incentives facing law enforcement ofcials. Its abil-
ity to reward them for “enforcing the law” is limited because “doing
justice” is largely unveriable. Many of the rewards that these
ofcials receive for doing justice are intangible, including self-es-
teem and the respect of one’s peers. On the other hand, the govern-
ment does have the ability to politicize the enforcement of particular
legal rules by rewarding the enforcers for certain outcomes such as
nding violations. We are interested in the conditions under which
the government would choose such politicization.
We consider an adjudicator (who can be a judge or a regula-
tor) examining a possible violation of a legal rule. For a cost c >
0, this adjudicator can undertake an investigation—which for
simplicity we call search—and nd out for sure whether a viola-
tion had taken place. We think of c as a personal cost to the

adjudicator, which includes the time he might otherwise spend
working on other matters. The adjudicator has complete discre-
tion as to whether to penalize the potential violator, and can
decide to do so without searching and incurring the cost c.
The adjudicator derives a payoff of b from following the law,
or doing justice, which here means punishing a violator of the rule
and letting go an innocent person. We can think of b as self-
esteem or long-run respect of the peers, which evidently matters
to judges [Posner 1995]. We assume that, in the short run, the
government cannot increase b, since it cannot verify whether
the adjudicator actually searches or makes correct decisions.
Training judges and building up their prestige presumably raises
b, but such policies may take decades to pay off.
In addition, the adjudicator derives the payoff a from each
suspect he punishes whether or not this suspect actually violated
the rules. If a = 0, this adjudicator is only interested in justice,
and is not motivated by “politics” or short-run career concerns. If
a > 0, this adjudicator has a personal interest in nding viola-
tions. This can be so for a number of reasons. The state may be
concerned with nding violators of particular rules to achieve its
broader political goals, such as ghting drugs or persecuting
particular ethnic minorities. More narrowly, only successful pun-
ishments of violators may be recorded by the superiors of an
enforcer, and hence his future career or budget may be deter-
mined by the number of penalties he metes out. Still another
important reason why adjudicators may wish to achieve certain
outcomes is that these improve their career opportunities follow-
ing government service [Glaeser, Kessler, and Piehl 2000]. In
principle, law enforcement can be heavily politicized, and a could
be a lot higher than b. We can also imagine the case where a <
0, which might describe regulators “captured” by the industry
that they are supposed to regulate [Stigler 1971]. In this case, the
analysis becomes very simple: the adjudicator will generally not
nd any violations. Note that, as we have set up the model, a, b,
and c capture the private rather than social payoffs and costs to
the adjudicator.
To complete the model, we assume that the fraction p of
suspected violators of the legal rule are actually guilty, and the
fraction (1 2 p) are innocent. The payoffs to the adjudicator and
the associated probabilities are shown in Table I.
The adjudicator makes the ex ante decision of whether to
TABLE I
Not Punish Punish Probability
Innocent b a 1 2 p
Guilty 0 a + b p
search. We refer to the strategy of letting everyone go regardless

of violation as “leniency” and the strategy of punishing everyone
regardless of violation as “abuse.” With b > 0, it never pays the
adjudicator to sink the cost c and then ignore the information he
obtains and be either lenient or abusive. If he searches, he always
punishes the violators and lets go the innocent. But before search,
it may pay the adjudicator to be either lenient or abusive, de-
pending on the magnitudes of a, b, c, and p.
To analyze the adjudicator’s incentives for enforcement, we
rst consider his payoffs to the three strategies he can pursue:
leniency, abuse, and search. These payoffs are given by
(1) Leniency: (1 2 p)b;
(2) Abuse: a + pb;
(3) Search: b + pa 2 c.
These payoffs dene the optimal strategies of the enforcer, as
summarized in
PROPOSITION 1. Fix b and p. The following strategies are followed
for respective parameter values:
Leniency: a # (1 2 2p)b and c $ (a + b) p;
Abuse: a $ (1 2 2p)b and c $ (b 2 a)(1 2 p);
Search: c # (a + b) p and c # (b 2 a)(1 2 p).
These conditions divide the space of parameter values into three
regions, as shown in Figure I.3
The interpretation of these conditions is straightforward. For
low-powered punishment incentives and high cost of search, the
adjudicator chooses leniency. For high-powered punishment in-
centives and high cost of search, the adjudicator turns to abuse.
He only searches for the truth as long as the cost of investigation
is low enough that, for low a’s, he prefers search to leniency and,
for high a’s, he prefers search to abuse.
Even this simple analysis in Figure I has several implica-
3. Note that if a > b, the only equilibrium outcome is abuse.

FIGURE I
A Simple Model of Incentives for Enforcement
The adjudicator’s incentive for enforcement divides the space of parameter
values into three regions: leniency, abuse, and search.
tions. First, we can think of c as a measure of the efciency of the

judicial system, the cost to the adjudicator of obtaining informa-
tion. In principle, c can be reduced through legal and regulatory
reform. In the context of nancial markets, for example, c can be
reduced by improving accounting systems and disclosure by issu-
ers and intermediaries. The model implies that reductions in the
level of c always lead to increases in search. For high levels of c,
search may not be achievable. Increasing career or nancial in-
centives of the enforcers only moves the system from leniency to
abuse—a risk that a society may not wish to take if it prefers the
former to the latter. Put differently, a relatively efcient legal
system—which could potentially be designed using appropriate
legal rules—is necessary for achieving just outcomes; without it,
it may be better to settle for leniency.
Second, for moderate and low levels of c, increasing incen-
tives for punishment may indeed have the effect of moving the
adjudicator from leniency to search. Even here, however, signi-
cant increases in a move the adjudicator out of search and into
abuse. This analysis cautions against the Becker-Stigler [1974]
FIGURE II
Comparative Statics: Adjudicator Professionalism (b)
The adjudicator’s incentive for enforcement divides the space of parameter
values into three regions: leniency, abuse, and search. Increasing adjudicator
professionalism (b) reduces the region of abuse.
enthusiasm for the high-powered enforcement incentives as it

shows the risk for abuse, particularly in inefcient legal systems.
We can use this model to provide further comparative statics
results, summarized in
PROPOSITION 2. Assume that b > a and that p < 12 . An increase
in adjudicator professionalism, b, always 1) strictly reduces
the region of abuse, 2) strictly increases the region of search,
and 3) diminishes leniency for low a’s—to favor search—and
expands leniency for high a’s—at the expense of abuse (Fig-
ure II). An increase in the fraction of suspects who are guilty,
p, always 1) reduces the region of leniency, 2) expands the
region of abuse, and 3) expands search for low a’s—at the
expense of leniency and reduces it for high a’s—to favor
abuse.
The intuition behind these results is straightforward. An
increase in the adjudicator’s concern for justice raises his aver-
sion to both letting the guilty go (resulting from leniency) and
punishing the innocent (resulting from abuse). As a consequence,

for a broader range of parameter values, he conducts a search.
Since with p < 12 most suspects are innocent, a higher b makes
leniency more attractive relative to abuse, further shrinking the
latter region.
An increase in the guilty share of the population, p, obviously
expands the range of abuse and contracts the range of search. For
low incentives, the attractiveness of search rises relative to that
of leniency and hence the scope of search expands. For high
incentives, the attractiveness of search falls relative to that of
abuse, and hence the scope of search contracts.
B. An Extension
In the basic model we assume that the fraction of violators, p,
is independent of the strategy the adjudicator pursues. More
generally, we expect a behavioral response by the potential vio-
lators: fewer of them would violate the legal rule if the adjudica-
tor searches than if he is either lenient or abusive. In this sub-
section we briey consider such a behavioral response.
Suppose that there are many adjudicators, so that the deci-
sions of a particular adjudicator have no effect on the pool of
potential violators. Denote by P the fraction of actual violators in
the population in the equilibrium where all the adjudicators are
either lenient or abusive. This P must be the same in the lenient
and the abusive equilibrium, since in both cases the action of the
potential violator has no effect on his fate. Denote by Q < P the
fraction of actual violators in the population in the equilibrium
where all the adjudicators search. If breaking a rule entails costs,
the likelihood of violations falls. An adjudicator chooses between
leniency, abuse, and search taking the behavior of other adjudi-
cators, and therefore P and Q, as given. In equilibrium, the
choices of the adjudicators must be consistent with the choices of
the potential violators.
Figure III presents the structure of equilibria in this model
for different parameter values. There are now six regions. As
before, the area of high search costs and low incentives, denoted
by L, has leniency as the only equilibrium. The area of high
search costs and high incentives, denoted by A, has abuse as the
only equilibrium. The area of low search costs, denoted by S, has
search as the only equilibrium. In area X, there is a unique mixed
strategy equilibrium, in which the fraction of actual violators is
given by p* = c/(a + b), adjudicators are indifferent between
FIGURE III
Incentives for Enforcement with Behavioral Response by Potential Violators
There are six different regions of equilibria.
search and leniency, and choose them in proportions that make

p* be the optimal response by the potential violators. In area Y,
there are three equilibria, including pure search, pure abuse, and
a mixture of the two with the fraction of actual violators given by
p** = 1 2 c/(b 2 a). The reason for multiplicity is that, starting
with the mixed strategy equilibrium in this region, a decision by
one adjudicator to become more abusive can increase the incen-
tive of the potential violators to break the rule, making abuse
rather than search more attractive for other adjudicators. Fi-
nally, in area Z, there are also multiple equilibria, including pure
abuse.
The addition of the behavioral response introduces the pos-
sibility of multiple and mixed strategy equilibria (alternatively,
different adjudicators do different things). Nonetheless, the gen-
eral thrust of the results, including our principal point that pro-
viding adjudicators with incentives is desirable for moderate lev-
els of investigation costs, is preserved.
C. Implications
What does this analysis imply for the choice of optimal en-
forcement incentives? To begin, we can think of a = 0 as the case
of “true justice,” which is perhaps provided by judges truly inde-

pendent of the government. We can alternatively think of high a’s
as regulators or prosecutors whose careers and budgets depend
not only on doing justice, but also on nding violations. One
further difference between judges and regulators might be the
greater specialization of the latter, leading to lower search cost c,
but one can of course imagine specialized judges, as in the cases
of bankruptcy or family law. The intermediate a’s may perhaps
correspond to civil law judges, who are part of the civil service and
hence may be dependent on the government, but who at the same
time have less of an incentive to nd violations than regulators do
[Ramseyer and Rasmusen 1997]. Using this interpretation, the
question becomes: “Who should enforce a particular legal rule?”
The model illustrates the costs and benets of enforcement
by judges and regulators. The government must choose the in-
centives of an enforcer, namely a (so long as career concerns are
not dominated by outside opportunities), to achieve two objec-
tives. The rst is to stimulate search, as opposed to leniency, and
thereby to punish the violators (this is the problem that Coasians
largely ignore). The second objective is to achieve justice by not
punishing the innocent (this is the problem that the advocates of
government regulation usually ignore). Increasing a has the bene-
t of stimulating search relative to leniency, and thereby making
it more likely that the violators are punished, but also the cost
of increasing the likelihood of abuse—the punishment of the
innocent as well as the violators without search. Put differently,
turning the enforcement of a legal rule over to an apolitical judge
has the benet that the innocent would be rarely punished, but a
judge— especially a judge with a low b—would also tend toward
leniency. In contrast, politicizing the system and turning the
enforcement to a regulator moves it away from leniency (provided
that this regulator is not captured, i.e., a > 0), but risks abuse.
In principle, the government would wish to have judges with
very high b’s—a very professional and motivated judiciary which
has both sufcient incentives to investigate and a strong interest
in justice. But this may not be possible. In this event, the model
suggests that the best enforcement strategy—particularly when
investigations are personally expensive (though not prohibitively
expensive)—may be to have a regulator with a high enough a to
get some search but not so high as to risk abuse. How high an a
the government chooses would depend on how much it cares
about punishing the violators relative to avoiding punishing the
innocent. Presumably, in the cases where punishing the innocent

is particularly expensive to the society, such as criminal law, the
costs of abuse are sufciently high that most governments would
still set a low and allocate adjudication to judges. In civil situa-
tions, however, the case for regulation is stronger, at least when
c is moderately high. The other way of looking at this is that
enforcement reforms which lower c are likely to stimulate search
and lead to more efcient outcomes, regardless of whether a judge
or a regulator handles the enforcement.
These predictions of the model relate to the case for securities
markets regulation made by James Landis [1938], the architect of
such regulation in the United States and one of the rst SEC
commissioners. Landis was skeptical that the courts were moti-
vated enough to punish dishonesty in security issuance and trad-
ing in a world where the opportunities for promoters and insiders
to expropriate investors were extensive. He thought that an in-
dependent and highly motivated SEC, whose only objective would
be to assure the integrity of nancial markets, could do this
better. He also argued that using regulators as adjudicators is a
better strategy because they face lower costs of investigation.
Lower costs encourage search and make abuse less likely for a
given level of incentives. The model can thus account for some
basic intuitions for when regulation might be preferred to judicial
enforcement.
In the following sections we examine the implications of the
model for nancial regulation in Poland and the Czech Republic
(and to a lesser extent Hungary). We examine the reform in two
crucial areas governing nancial markets: corporate law and
securities law. Corporate law deals in particular with the rela-
tionship between corporate insiders and shareholders, and is
typically enforced through private litigation. Securities law regu-
lates nancial markets. As such it also deals with some aspects of
shareholder protection. In addition, securities law species the
status and the powers of the securities regulator and deals with
disclosure of information by securities issuers and intermediar-
ies. Variation in the securities laws, therefore, can be interpreted
as variation in a and c in the model: a more motivated regulator
would have a higher a, and greater disclosure would correspond
to a lower c. We show that Poland and the Czech Republic have
adopted very different strategies toward shareholder protection,
especially in their securities laws, and that these strategies can
be interpreted in light of the model. Our evidence suggests that
the greater success of nancial development in Poland than in the

Czech Republic might be related to the more appropriate regula-
tory stance in Poland, in line with the predictions of the theo-
retical analysis.
III. INITIAL CONDITIONS

In broad terms, Poland and Czechoslovakia share similar
histories over the past 50 years. Both countries turned commu-
nist and became Soviet satellites shortly after World War II, and
spent the next 40 years building socialism. In 1989 the two
countries spearheaded the anticommunist revolution. In Poland,
Solidarity won overwhelming support in the June 1989 elections,
and by September 1989 was able to form a government. In
Czechoslovakia the communists gave up their “leading role” in
the country in the face of massive protests in November 1989, and
the communist President resigned in December. Free elections in
June 1990 completed a sequence of events that came to be known
as “the velvet revolution.”
At the beginning of reforms, Poland had a larger population
of 38 million people, compared with 10.3 million in the Czech
Republic. The Czech Republic in 1989 had per capita income of
$5727 in constant 1995 U. S. dollars compared with Poland’s
$3045. Both countries were fully industrialized, with an indus-
trial structure largely shaped by decades of Soviet-style central
planning. Both countries border on Western Europe and in par-
ticular Germany, although Warsaw is 569 miles from Frankfurt
while Prague is only 261 miles away.
Both countries initiated economic reforms immediately after
shedding communism. In Poland critical legislation on liberaliza-
tion was passed in the fall of 1989, and the key measures came
into effect on January 1, 1990. Small-scale privatization began in
May 1990, although large-scale privatization started with a whis-
per in 1991, ran into political obstacles, and spread over most of
the 1990s. In Czechoslovakia reforms were also initiated in early
1990, with the devaluation of the currency, budget cuts, and
banking reform. The formal reform package, including price in-
creases, started on January 1, 1991. The law on large-scale pri-
vatization was adopted on February 1, 1991. Privatization
through vouchers took place in two waves: in 1992 (completed in
TABLE II
COMPARISON OF ECONOMIC REFORM POLICIES BY THE EBRD
Czech Czech Czech

Poland Republic Poland Republic Poland Republic
Transition Transition Transition

indicators 1997 indicators 1996 indicators 1995
Private sector
share of GDP 65 75 60 75 60 70
Large-scale
privatization 3+ 4 3 4 3 4
Small-scale
privatization 4+ 4+ 4* 4* 4* 4*
Governance and
restructuring 3 3 3 3 3 3
Price liberalization 3 3 3 3 3 3
Trade and foreign
exchange system 4+ 4+ 4* 4* 4* 4*
Competition policy 3 3 3 3 3 3
Banking reform
and interest rate
liberalization 3 3 3 3 3 3
Securities market
and nonbank
nancial
institutions 3+ 3 3 3 3 3
Scale is from 1 (no reform) to 4+ (full reform).

Source: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development [1997, 1996, 1995].
mid-1993) and 1993 (completed in 1994). Most rules of privatiza-

tion, including those on Investment Privatization Funds, were
developed in 1991 [Coffee 1996].
Moreover, both countries were virtually nished with
these basic reforms by 1994. They received virtually identical
scores on every World Bank indicator of the pace of transition
[de Melo, Denizer, and Gelb 1996]. The European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development also ranked them very
closely (see Table II). Although the Czech Republic moved more
rapidly on large-scale privatization and so had a somewhat
higher share of its GDP generated in the private sector, in
matters such as small-scale privatization, governance and re-
structuring, price and trade liberalization, competition policy,
banking reform, and nancial institutions, the countries are
neck and neck and very far advanced. 4 In short, both countries
were rapid and thorough reformers in their emergence from
communism, especially in comparison with other transition
economies.
There are, however, two differences which we come back to
below. First, the Czech large-scale voucher privatization was
faster and more extensive than privatization in Poland, which
over time utilized a variety of methods from direct sales to share
transfers to mutual funds. As a consequence, the number of
publicly held companies in the early 1990s was signicantly
higher in the Czech Republic than in Poland. Second, during this
period Poland grew faster but also had higher ination than the
Czech Republic. The assessments of growth rates depend on
exactly how they are calculated. The level of GDP in Poland in
1997 stood at 110 relative to 100 in 1989, whereas in the Czech
Republic it stood only at 90. Using constant 1995 dollars, how-
ever, Poland’s advantage is smaller.5 During 1992–1997 the
Czech ination averaged 13.9 percent per annum, while Polish
ination was signicantly higher at 26.5 percent.
In legal development, the two countries again appear similar.
In the universe of transition economies, both get perfect or nearly
perfect scores, although these scores have only been kept after
1995. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
evaluates transition economies on the extensiveness of laws
(since 1996), effectiveness of laws (since 1996), and overall legal
development (since 1995). Table III, Panel A, presents the scores
for Poland and the Czech Republic, which again are close to each
other and as high as those of any transition economy.6 The legal
systems of the two countries, however, lagged behind those of rich
market economies. Freedom House generates an index of “equal-
ity of citizens under the law and access of citizens to a non-
discriminatory judiciary.” In 1995–1996 both Poland and the
4. In 1997 the EBRD gave Poland a 3+ relative to the Czech Republic’s 3 on

securities markets and nancial institutions. We argue below that the difference
should have been larger.
5. The World Bank reports the level of real GDP using constant 1995 prices
but calculates growth rates using the GDP deator. Given the large changes in
relative prices during reforms, it is hard to know which measure is better. On
every available measure, however, Poland has had more growth since 1989, and
grew signicantly faster during the 1995–1998 period.
6. Pistor [1995] assesses the extent of legal development in a number of
transition economies. She gives Poland and the Czech Republic the same score,
the highest (shared with Hungary) among all the transition economies she
studies.
TABLE III
LEGAL ENVIRONMENT
Czech Czech Czech Czech

Panel A Poland Republic Poland Republic Poland Republic Poland Republic
EBRD 1997 1996 1995
Extensiveness
of laws 4 4 4* 4 n.a. n.a.
Effectiveness
of laws 4+ 4 3 4* n.a. n.a.
Overall 4 4 4 4 4 4
Panel B
Wall Street Journal December 1997– December 1996– December 1995– February
CEER survey January 1998 January 1997 January 1996 1995
Rule of law/legal
safeguards 9 8.7 9 8.8 9.1 9.1 n.a. n.a.
Legal framework 9.8 9.8
Scale for legal extensiveness and legal effectiveness is from 1 (no reform) to 5 (full reform).
Scale for rule for law/legal safeguards, and legal framework is from 1 to 10 (the highest/best score).
Source: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development [1997, 1996, 1995], and Central European
Economic Review, a supplement of the Wall Street Journal Europe (issues indicated in table).
Czech Republic received scores of 5 out of 10, compared with 7.5

or 10 for the rich industrial countries.7 The 1997 World Competi-
tiveness Yearbook [IMD 1997] in its question on the legal frame-
work, gave Poland 4.16 out of 9 and the Czech Republic 4.66. This
compares with 8.46 for the world leader, Singapore (and over
eight generally for rich industrial countries) and the low of 2.35
for Venezuela. Finally, the 1996 Global Competitiveness Report
[World Economic Forum 1996], in its question on condence in
the fair administration of justice, gives 2.93 out of 6 to the Czech
Republic and 2.92 to Poland. This compares with the high of 5.78
for New Zealand, and the low of 1.77 for Russia. All the surveys,
then, treat the judicial systems of the two countries as about
equally advanced, ahead of world laggards yet far behind the rich
industrial countries.
These results are echoed by the concerns of knowledgeable
observers about the state of the judicial system in the two coun-
tries in the early stages of reform [Gray et al. 1993]. With respect
7. These numbers come from Economic Freedom of the World 1997, by James
Gwartney and Robert Lawson, a publication of The Fraser Institute, a conserva-
tive think tank in Canada.
to Poland, Gray et al. [p. 109] write: “Many of the newly appointed
judges lack experience. . . . Developing such expertise will take
time. Lack of experience and expertise creates uncertainty in the
business population . . .” With respect to the Czech Republic,
Gray et al. [p. 59] note: “As in other Central and East European
countries, judicial institutions in the Czech Republic are ill pre-
pared to cope with the rapidly emerging challenges of the market
economy . . . Incapacity in the court system is likely to be a
constraint for some time to come.”
In summary, the economies and the economic policies of
Poland and the Czech Republic share some remarkable similari-
ties during the 1990s. The two countries emerged from socialism
with a need to massively reorganize their economies and pro-
ceeded to do so both rapidly and effectively. In many crucial
respects, they followed similar policies toward this goal, and
achieved similar results, especially compared with other, less
successful, transition economies.
IV. COMPANY LAW

Recent research shows that investor protection through com-
pany laws and commercial codes is an important deterrent of
expropriation of outside investors, and as such a key determinant
of the development of securities markets across countries [La
Porta et al. 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000; Johnson et al. 2000a]. Before
focusing on securities regulations, therefore, it is important to
compare Poland and the Czech Republic along this dimension.8
La Porta et al. [LLSV 1998] propose six dimensions to evalu-
ate how well a commercial code (or company law) protects mi-
nority shareholders against expropriation by the insiders, and
combine them into an index of shareholder protection. Table IV,
Panel A, presents and explains this index and its components for
Poland and the Czech Republic, based on their rst postreform
8. Poland’s law dates back to the code of 1934, which was modied repeatedly
through the communist era and in the early 1990s. The Polish commercial code
has both German and French inuences [Gray et al. 1993; Pistor 1999]. Although
the Czech Republic also had a commercial code from the 1930s, its laws were
“more thoroughly abrogated” than those of Poland during communism, and it
accordingly adopted a new commercial code on January 1, 1992 [Gray et al. 1993].
The principal inuence on the Czech commercial code was German. In this and
the following sections, we examined the laws adopted in the early 1990s, which
are relevant for nancial development during the 1990s. Toward the end of the
decade, the laws have been revised in both countries, particularly in the Czech
Republic.
TABLE IV
COMPARISON OF LLSV DIMENSIONS
SHAREHOLDER RIGHTS FROM COMMERCIAL CODES
Panel A
LLSV LLSV
Poland Comment score Czech Comment score
Proxy-by-mail No Article 405 (proxy 0 No Article 185 0

in person is
allowed)
Shares blocked Yes Article 399 (one 0 Yes (one week ahead 0
before general week ahead of of meeting)
meeting of meeting)
shareholders
Oppressed Yes Articles 409 and 1 Yes Can protest 1

minority 414 decision of
mechanism general
assembly
Shareholders have No Not mentioned in 0 No Can be excluded 0
preemptive right Polish law by Articles of
to new issues Association
(Article
204(2))
Percent of votes 10% Article 394 1 10% Article 181 1
needed to call
extraordinary
general meeting
Cumulative voting Yes Article 379 1 No Articles 186 and 0

A combination of 200
shareholders 51% of the votes
with at least is enough to
20% of the appoint all
share capital the directors.
can elect a 13 of seats go
board member to employees

if at least 500
workers
“Anti-Director 3 2
Rights” index,
calculated as in
LLSV
Denitions used in Panel A

(from LLSV [1998]):
One share-one vote Equals one if the company law or commercial code of
the country requires that ordinary shares carry
one vote per share, and zero otherwise.
Equivalently, this variable equals one when the
law prohibits the existence of both multiple-voting
and nonvoting ordinary shares and does not allow
setting maximum number of votes per shareholder
irrespective of the number rms of shares owned,
and zero otherwise.
Proxy by mail allowed Equals one if the company law or commercial code
allows shareholders to mail their proxy vote to the
rm, and zero otherwise.
Shares not blocked Equals one if the company law or commercial code
before meeting does not allow rms to require that shareholders
deposit their shares prior to a general
shareholders meeting, thus preventing them from
selling those shares for a number of days, and
zero otherwise.
Cumulative voting or Equals one if the company law or commercial code
proportional allows shareholders to cast all their votes for one
representation candidate standing for election to the board of
directors (cumulative voting) or if the company
law or commercial code allows a mechanism of
proportional representation in the board by which
minority interests may name a proportional
number of directors to the board, and zero
otherwise.
Oppressed minorities Equals one if the company law or commercial code
mechanism grants minority shareholders either a judicial
venue to challenge the decisions of management or
of the assembly or the right to step out of the
company by requiring the company to purchase
their shares when they object to certain
fundamental changes, such as mergers, asset
dispositions, and changes in the articles of
incorporation. The variable equals zero otherwise.
Minority shareholders are dened as those
shareholders who own 10 percent of share capital
or less.
Preemptive rights Equals one when the company law or commercial
code grants shareholders the rst opportunity to
buy new issues of stock, and this right can be
waived only by a shareholders’ vote; equals zero
otherwise.
Percentage of share The minimum percentage of ownership of share
capital to call an capital that entitles a shareholder to call for an
extraordinary extraordinary shareholders’ meeting; it ranges
shareholders’ meeting from 1 to 33 percent.
commercial codes. Neither country allows proxy-by-mail (score

zero), each requires that shares be blocked before the annual
meeting of shareholders (score zero), and neither gives sharehold-
ers a preemptive right to new share issues (score zero). They each
require 10 percent of the votes to call an extraordinary share-
holder meeting (score 1), and each provide the minority share-
holders with some opportunities to protest certain majority deci-
sions (score 1). The two laws differ in one important dimension
using this classication: the Polish law allows a signicant (20
percent and in some cases less) minority shareholder to elect a
director. Under the Czech law, 51 percent of the votes are enough
to appoint all directors. Overall, Poland ends up with a score of 3
out of 6 on anti-director rights, and the Czech Republic with a
score of 2.
To put these scores in perspective, the highest actual share-
holder rights score in the LLSV [1998] sample of 49 countries is
5. Several common law countries, such as the United States, the
United Kingdom, and Canada receive this score. Belgium is the
lowest in the sample, with a score of 0, but several countries
including Italy, Jordan, and Mexico get a score of 1. The average
in the sample is 3. Thus, Poland is average in the world in
protecting shareholder rights through the company law, while the
Czech Republic is below the average.
Some additional rules in the commercial codes, not studied
by LLSV [1998], are also more protective of minority shareholders
in Poland (Table IV, Panel B). Poland gives important rights to
signicant minority shareholders (those with either 20 percent of
the votes or 20 percent of share capital). In Poland, but not in the
Czech Republic, this group can demand the appointment of an
additional board of auditors, and not just a seat on the supervi-
sory board. This group can also check who attended the general
shareholders’ meeting, thus keeping the management from ma-
nipulating the total number of the available votes. Both countries
generally require supermajorities for important decisions, such
as the change in the objectives of the company. Poland grants a
shorter term in ofce to directors (three years) than does the
Czech Republic (ve years). In one interesting regard, the Czech
law is more protective of minority shareholders. Article 185 of the
Czech 1992 Commercial Code requires that a quorum of 30 per-
cent of the total possible votes be present at a general meeting of
shareholders. The Polish Commercial Code does not set any such
quorum (Article 401).
TABLE IV
(CONTINUED)
Panel B
Poland Czech Republic
Further rights of No Art. 404: can No Can set max votes

shareholders “One limit votes per shareholder
share-one vote” (for of large (Article 180)
ordinary shares) and shareholders
no limits on votes per
shareholder
Supervisory board and Yes Articles 377 Yes Articles 194 and
management board and 366 200
both elected by
shareholders’ meeting
Shareholders Yes Article No Not mentioned in
representing at least 377(3) Czech law
one-fth of shares can
demand an additional
board of auditors
Shareholders with 10% Yes Article 403 No Article 185
of share capital
represented at
general meeting can
check the list of
attendance
Two-thirds majority of Yes Article 389 No Not mentioned in
general assembly or Czech law
votes cast needed for
large purchases (over
one-fth of share
capital) within two
years of registration
of company
Two-thirds majority of Yes Article 409 Yes Article 187
general assembly or each share
votes cast needed to has one
change articles of vote
association or objects without
of company preferences
or
restrictions
Term of board of 3 years Article 366 5 years Article 194
directors and 381
(management board)
Bearer shares allowed Yes Article 345 Yes Article 155 and
156
Preference shares Yes Article 357 Yes Article 159
allowed (possibly
without voting rights)
Quorum of votes needed None Article 401 30% Article 185
to be present
In summary, Poland’s company law is somewhat more pro-

tective of minority shareholders than the Czech law. These dif-
ferences in themselves, however, do not appear to be signicant
enough to account for the differences in nancial development
documented below.
V. SECURITIES LAW AND REGULATION

Despite the many crucial similarities, the two countries fol-
lowed different approaches to reform in terms of the government’s
interest in regulatory intervention. This difference did not escape
the early observers of the two countries, who viewed Czech eco-
nomic policy as more laissez-faire than Polish economic policy.
For example, in each of the three years 1994 –1996, the conser-
vative Heritage Foundation gave the Czech Republic a perfect
(from its perspective) score of 1 and Poland a mediocre score of 3
on its measure of “regulation”—the extent to which government
restricts economic activity. Along similar lines, Euromoney con-
sidered Poland to be riskier for foreign investment and lending
than the Czech Republic, in part because property rights were
less secure from government intervention.
These observers had every right to form such opinions based
on the pronouncements about markets and market reform coming
from economic ofcials in the two countries. Vaclav Klaus, the
Czech Finance Minister and later Prime Minister, was both tre-
mendously articulate and unabashedly antigovernment in his
vision of reforms: “We knew that we had to liberalize, deregulate,
privatize at a very early stage of the transformation process, even
if we might be confronted with rather weak and, therefore, not
fully efcient markets . . . Conceptually it was—at least for me—
rather simple: all you had to do was to apply the economic phi-
losophy of the University of Chicago [Klaus 1997, from a 1995
speech].” Leszek Balcerowicz, the champion of Polish reforms,
was more cautious: “The capacity of the state to deal with various
problems varies, mainly because of varying informational re-
quirements. On this basis, one can distinguish on the one hand,
the sphere of the state’s natural competence (legislating and
enforcing the law, dealing with other states, for example) and, on
the other hand, its sphere of natural incompetence (a massive and
detailed industrial policy, for example) [1995, p. 176].”
These differences revealed themselves most clearly in the
regulation of capital markets. The Polish “Law of Public Trading
in Securities and Trust Funds” was adopted on March 22, 1991,

and became effective in early April 1991. The Czech “Securities
Act” was adopted in 1992, and became effective on January 1,
1993. Although this Act was passed after privatization had
started, nancial institutions, such as Investment Privatization
Funds (IPFs), apparently did not lobby for or against it. In fact,
the Czech rules were established before privatization started and
before the IPFs existed, and only codied later [Coffee 1996].
They were a product of the government’s economic philosophy,
not lobbying.
In our analysis of securities laws, we focus especially on two
issues. First, we show that there were signicant differences in
the institutions of securities regulation in the two countries,
particularly with respect to the independence and the power of
securities regulators. We interpret the greater independence and
power of the regulator as an increase in the parameter a in the
model: the incentives of the adjudicator. Second, we show that the
issuers and the intermediaries in the two countries faced radi-
cally different disclosure requirements, so that the regulators had
very different access to information. We interpret the greater
mandatory disclosure, and the use of intermediaries to enforce it
as reductions in the parameter c in the model: the cost of search.
From this perspective on regulation, an examination of secu-
rities laws in Poland and the Czech Republic reveals profound
differences. To begin, the two laws differed in the identity of the
government body supervising securities markets. In Poland it
was an independent Securities Commission. In the Czech Repub-
lic such a commission was not established initially, and markets
were supervised by the Capital Markets Supervisors Ofce of the
Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance during this period
was rst under Klaus, and later, when he became Prime Minister,
remained indifferent to regulating securities markets. Both su-
pervisory bodies received the power to generate regulations, to
issue and revoke licenses, and to impose nes for violations of
security laws and regulations, but had to refer criminal cases to
the public prosecutor. The criminal channel was scarcely used in
either country. The fact that the Polish Securities Commission
was independent, and charged solely with supervision of securi-
ties markets, is likely to have provided it with greater incentives
to nd violations than those faced by the Czech Ministry of
Finance, with its much broader agenda.
A key difference in the structure of securities laws in the two
countries is in the emphasis on the regulation of intermediaries.

The idea of focusing the regulation of securities markets on in-
termediaries is sometimes credited to James Landis [Landis
1938; McCraw 1984], who reasoned that the U. S. SEC could
monitor neither the compliance with disclosure, reporting, and
other rules by all listed rms, nor the trading practices of all
market participants. Rather, the SEC would regulate intermedi-
aries, such as brokers, accounting rms, investment advisors,
etc., placing on them the burden of assuring compliance with
regulatory requirements by issuers and traders. By maintaining
substantial administrative power over the intermediaries, includ-
ing the power to issue and revoke licenses, the Commission could
force them to monitor market participants. Moreover, the inter-
mediaries would be relatively few in number, and more concerned
with their own reputations with the SEC compared with most of
the issuers. By privatizing part of the enforcement of disclosure to
the intermediaries, the regulator could reduce the share of the
enforcement costs he had to bear himself—a reduction in c in our
model.
Table V compares the two laws from the perspective of the
regulation of nancial intermediaries. In the regulation of indi-
vidual brokers, Poland instituted relatively elaborate licensing
requirements, accompanied by tests. Brokers were supposed to
engage in “honest trading” as interpreted by the Commission, and
could lose their license. The Czech Republic had much more pro
forma licensing of brokers, with easy exams, no warning concern-
ing “honest trading” and evidently no real power of the Commis-
sion to revoke licenses. The Polish Commission used the broad
“honest trading” requirement, and its own power to interpret it,
to discourage brokers’ practices that might not have served the
interests of clients.
Brokerage rms were also licensed in both countries but
faced considerably stiffer regulations in Poland. For example, the
regulator received the right to access and inspect the books of
brokerage rms, and these rms had to disclose their ownership
structure, stay away from trading in the securities issued by a
parent or a subsidiary company, and retain organizational and
nancial separateness from banks which owned some of them.
These regulations did not exist in the Czech Republic. It is clear
that the Czech Republic adopted a very hands-off stance toward
brokers and brokerage rms, in contrast to Poland.
The Czech Securities law contained no regulation of invest-
TABLE V
REGULATION OF INTERMEDIARIES
Individual brokers
Licensed by securities Yes Articles 18.2 Yes Section 49

market regulator and 14.1
Must pass exam Yes Article 14.1(4) No Section 49
administered by
securities market
regulator
Required to engage in Yes Article 17.1 No Section 49
“honest trading” and act
in the interest of clients
License can be suspended Yes Article 16.2 Yes Section 49
or revoked by Securities and 16.3
Commission
Brokerage enterprises
Licensed by securities Yes Article 18.2 Yes Section 45

market regulator
Securities market regulator Yes Article 26 No Sections 45–48
has right of access and
inspection
License can be suspended Yes Article 25.3 Yes Section 48(2)
or revoked by securities
market regulator
Required to engage in Yes Article 25.2(3) No Sections 45–48
“honest trading” and act
Must not conduct other Yes Article 18.6 No Sections 45–48
business with the same
name
Must report who has more Yes Article 23.2 No Sections 45–48
than 5 percent of voting
rights at general meeting
of shareholders
Must report any change of Yes Article 23.3 No Sections 45–48
voting rights for one
person above 2 percent
Bank engaged in brokerage Yes Article 24 No Sections 45–48
operations must have
organizational and
nancial separateness of
department for public
trading in securities
Must not trade securities Yes Article 31 No Sections 45–48
issued by parent or
subsidiary company
TABLE V
(CONTINUED)
Investment advisers
(rms engaged in advisory activity in the eld of public trading)
Licensed by securities Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in

market regulator the Czech law
Must pass exam set by Yes Article 33.3 No Not mentioned in
securities market the Czech law
regulator
Securities market regulator Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
has right of access and the Czech law
inspection
License can be suspended Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
or revoked by securities the Czech law
market regulator
Required to engage in Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
“honest trading” and act the Czech law
Must not conduct other Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
business with the same the Czech law
name
Must report who has more Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
than 5 percent of voting the Czech law
rights at general meeting
of shareholders
Must report any change of Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
voting rights for one the Czech law
person above 2 percent
Bank engaged in Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
investment advisory the Czech law
operations must have
organizational and
nancial separateness of
department for public
trading in securities
Must not trade securities Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in
issued by parent or the Czech law
subsidiary company
Sources: Poland: Act of Trading in Securities and Trust Funds, 1991; Czech: Securities Act 1992.
TABLE V
(CONTINUED)
Poland Czech
Stock markets
Trading must take place on Section 50 of the

a stock exchange Yes Article 54.1 No Securities Law
Securities regulator
controls stock exchange Not mentioned in
rules Yes No Czech law
Securities exchange should Not mentioned in
ensure a uniform market Yes Article 57(1) No Czech law
Securities exchange should
ensure dissemination of
uniform information on Not mentioned in
the value of securities Yes Article 57(3) No Czech law
Agreements among any
groups to articially
raise or lower the price
of securities are Not mentioned in
prohibited Yes Article 64.3 No Czech law
Mutual funds
Mutual funds may be
administered solely by Not mentioned in
mutual fund companies Yes Article 89.2 No Czech law
Mutual fund companies are
licensed by securities
regulator Yes Article 89 Yes Section 8
Mutual fund company can
be dissolved by securities
regulator Yes Article 98 Yes Section 37
Mutual fund companies
must be joint stock
companies Yes Article 90.1 No Section 2
Only registered shares are
allowed in mutual fund
companies (no bearer Not mentioned in
shares) Yes Article 92.2 No Czech law
Closed-end funds are
allowed No Article 104 Yes
Founder limited to 10% of Not mentioned in
share capital Yes Article 93(1) No Czech law
Founder not allowed to be Not mentioned in
on Management Board Yes Article 93(1) No Czech law
Publicly traded securities
or government
obligations Yes Article 107 No Section 17
TABLE V
(CONTINUED)
Poland Czech
No more than 5% of the

funds assets can be in
securities issued by one
issuer Yes Article 108 No Section 17
Custodian banks (for mutual funds)
All fund assets must be

entrusted to a trustee
bank Yes Article 112.1 Yes Section 31
Trustee bank must make
sure that sale and
retirement of
participation units in the
fund are consonant with
the law and house rules Article Not mentioned in
of the fund Yes 112.2(2) No Czech law
Trustee bank must
compute the net worth of Article Not mentioned in
the fund’s assets Yes 112.2(3) No Czech law
Trustee bank must not
execute instructions that
are in conict with the
law or house rules of the Article Not mentioned in
fund Yes 112.2(4) No Czech law
Trustee bank must make
sure income of the fund Article Not mentioned in
is made public Yes 112.2(6) No Czech law
Trustee bank may not be a
founder of the mutual
fund company, or a buyer
of its securities, or the
administrator of the Not mentioned in
company Yes Article 113.1 No Czech law
Mutual fund company may
not buy securities issued
by the trustee bank or a Not mentioned in
related company Yes Article 113.2 No Czech law
Source: Polish Act of Trading in Securities and Trust Funds, 1991; Czech Investment Companies and
Investment Funds Act April 1992 and Stock Exchange Act 1992.
ment advisors; the Polish law contained substantial regulations,

including licensing. The Polish law restricted trading to take
place on a stock exchange, and regulated these exchanges to
ensure some transparency in trading. The Czech law did not

include such regulations. The Polish law contained detailed regu-
lations of mutual funds, and in fact for several years the entry
into this activity was severely limited. The Czech law took a much
more lenient approach again. Finally, the Polish law contained
stringent regulations of custodian banks, which are an important
checkpoint for changes in ownership that might facilitate tunnel-
ing. The Czech law again was less restrictive.
Finally, the Polish Securities law, to a much greater extent
than the Czech law, established administrative procedures en-
abling the securities market regulator to discipline the interme-
diaries without recourse to the judicial system. The intermediaries
could then appeal the decisions of the regulator to administrative
courts, but then they, rather than the regulator, had to face the
delays and the inefciency of the judicial system. Because the judi-
ciary in neither country is corrupt, the regulators had little fear of
their lawful decisions being overturned.
Table VI compares the two original laws from the perspective
of the regulation of security issuers, especially in the area of
disclosure. Recall that greater disclosure of nancial information
can serve to reduce the cost of information acquisition by a regu-
lator or a judge. In Poland the introduction of securities to public
trading required both permission of the regulator and a prospec-
tus. The Czech law required neither. The Polish law required
monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and annual reporting of nan-
cial information; the Czech law only the annual results. The
Polish law required disclosure of all material information; the
Czech law only that of signicant adverse developments.
Financial results are one area where disclosure may be im-
portant; ownership structure is another. The Polish law required
disclosure of substantial minority shareholdings; the Czech law
did not. Indeed, under the original Polish law, a shareholder
crossing 10, 20, 33, 50, 66, and 75 percent ownership stakes had
to publicly disclosure his ownership. The lack of disclosure of
minority shareholdings has been seen as a problem in several West
European countries, since it enables anonymous large shareholders
to collude with management and expropriate minority shareholders
[European Corporate Governance Network 1997]. Finally, the orig-
inal Polish law also required a mandatory bid for the remaining
shares when a 50 percent ownership threshold was reached; the
Czech law did not. Such mandatory bids, combined with disclosure
of ownership, are intended to prevent the expropriation of minority
TABLE VI 882
REGULATION OF LISTED COMPANIES
Regulation of listed companies
Introduction of securities into public trading requires Yes Article 49 No Not mentioned in Czech law
permission of the securities regulator
Introduction of securities into public trading requires Yes Article 50.2 No Not mentioned in Czech law
a prospectus
False statement in prospectus is forbidden Yes Article 118 Yes Section 79
Monthly reporting of nancial information Yes Reg. of Sec. Comm. and Stock No Not mentioned in Czech law
Exchange
Quarterly reporting of nancial information Yes Reg. of Sec. Comm. and Stock No Not mentioned in Czech law
Exchange
Semiannual reporting of nancial information Yes Reg. of Sec. Comm. and Stock No Not mentioned in Czech law
Exchange
Annual reporting of nancial information Yes Reg. of Sec. Comm. and Stock Yes Section 80
Exchange
Obligation to publish all material information Yes Reg. of Sec. Comm. and Stock No Section 80 just signicant
Exchange adverse developments
Constraints on purchasers/potential controlling shareholders

Transparency of ownership requirement Yes No Centre for Securities can change
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
ownership without disclosure

Threshold at which must declare stake (percent) None
10 Yes Article 72 No Not mentioned in Czech law
20 Yes No Not mentioned in Czech law
Form of disclosure required to Securities Commission Yes No Not mentioned in Czech law
To Anti-Monopoly Ofce Yes No Not mentioned in Czech law
To company Yes No Not mentioned in Czech law
Company must announce who owns more than 10% Yes In 2 national Polish newspapers No Not mentioned in Czech law
Threshold at which must make general offer

Must make offer if intend to pass specied threshold Yes Any person who intends to acquire No Not mentioned in Czech law
for ownership stake shares in one company, once or
by way of repeated transactions,
becoming within 12 months the
holder of shares in an amount
that guarantees him reaching or
surpassing 33 percent of votes
at the general meeting, shall be
obliged to do so solely by way of
public invitation to subscribe for
the sale or the exchange or
shares . . . (Article 73)
Must make offer if actual ownership stake passes Yes Any person who has become a holder No Not mentioned in Czech law
specied threshold of shares in one company
representing over 50 percent of the
votes at the general meeting, shall
be obliged, prior to exercising any
COASE VERSUS THE COASIANS
powers resulting from the right to

vote, to announce an invitation to
subscribe for the sale or exchange
of the remaining shares in that
company (Article 87).
883
TABLE VI 884
(CONTINUED)
Tender offer rules

Not allowed to hide behind a related company Yes Cannot hide behind “dependent No Not mentioned in Czech law
subject” (Article 72(2), Article 73(2))
Transactions in share on the stock exchange Yes All transactions in this share on the No Not mentioned in Czech law
should be suspended stock exchange should be suspended
Time limit for subscribing Yes 25 days No Not mentioned in Czech law
Must buy all the shares offered Yes No Not mentioned in Czech law
Specied price for purchase . . . the Commission may forbid the
announcing of the invitation if . . . the
price offered in the invitation is lower
by 10 percent than the average
market price during 3 months
immediately preceding the
announcement of the invitation.
(Article 74)
The price offered . . . cannot be lower
than the highest price paid thereby for
the shares in the last 12 months, or
where no such price was paid—the
average market price in the last 30
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
days before the announcement of the

invitation. The price shall also be
regarded as the value of things or
rights intended to be given by the
inviting person in exchange for shares
Conditions under which can “go private”
Securities Commission must approve Yes Not specied
Sources: Polish and Czech Securities Laws.

shareholders in tender offers, since they force an acquirer to buy out

minority shareholders when he gains control.
This evidence shows that Poland chose to regulate its secu-
rities markets more stringently than the Czech Republic. In line
with the model, its law provided for extensive disclosure of nan-
cial and ownership information, a way to reduce c and thus to
facilitate regulation (as well as private governance). The Polish
reliance on nancial intermediaries to ensure nancial disclosure
can also be seen as a reduction in c. Also in line with the model,
Poland relied on administrative control over markets by a moti-
vated securities regulator, an increase in a relative to judicial
enforcement. This could, in principle, motivate the regulators to
become informed and reduce the likelihood of leniency. We next
consider whether this approach worked.
VI. OUTCOMES
A. Qualitative Assessments
Stable prices, rapid privatization, and openness to the West
combined to generate favorable initial assessments of the Czech
economic reforms. By 1996, however, there was mounting evi-
dence of systematic expropriation of minority shareholders by
Investment Privatization Funds and company insiders colluding
with them. Coffee [1996], who rst presented his paper in 1994,
drew attention to such expropriation—which came to be known
as tunneling. In a typical scheme, the managers of an IPF holding
a large stake in a privatized company would agree with the
managers of this company to create a new (possibly off-shore)
entity, which they would jointly control. The IPF might then sell
its shares in the company to this entity at below market price,
thereby expropriating the shareholders of the IPF. The company
could also sell some of its assets or its output to the new entity,
again at below fair value, thereby expropriating its own minority
shareholders. These arrangements between corporate managers
and their large shareholders (IPFs) enriched them at the expense
of minority investors in both the rms and the IPFs (see Coffee
[1996, 1998] for a discussion of tunneling in the Czech Republic).
The laxity of the securities law accommodated tunneling.
First, since transactions did not need to take place on an ex-
change, large blocks of shares could change hands off the ex-
change at less than the prevailing market price. Even on an
exchange, there was no guarantee of price uniformity. Moreover,

brokers and brokerage rms had no restrictions on facilitating
such transactions, nor did the custodian banks have any regula-
tory duty to stop them. Second, since there was no requirement of
ownership disclosure, the acquirers of large blocks could remain
secret. Third, without a mandatory bid, these acquirers had no
obligation to buy out the remaining minority shareholders.
Fourth, the IPFs appear to have been under no restrictions in
pursuing such transactions, since their management did not owe
any clearly regulated duty to their investors let alone to the
minority shareholders of the companies they tunneled. Fifth,
there was no reason to disclose any nancial transactions be-
tween the new owner of shares and the company, since such
transactions were generally allowed and did not need to be dis-
closed except perhaps in the annual report several months later.
Finally, the minority shareholders had virtually no legal recourse
in stopping such expropriation except in a very few cases when
the oppressed minority mechanism came into play, and even
substantial minority shareholders could not elect their own di-
rectors to represent their interests.
During the mid-1990s, the heyday of tunneling in the Czech
Republic, the regulators did very little to stop it. Part of the
problem was the weakness of the laws. But equally important
was probably the lack of interest of securities regulators com-
bined with judicial ineffectiveness.
By 1996, it became widely believed that something had gone
wrong with the regulation of the Czech nancial markets. In
March 1996 the Central European Economic Review, a publica-
tion of the Wall Street Journal, surveyed assorted brokerages and
fund managers on corporate governance in four transition econo-
mies. The survey asked respondents to comment on the disclo-
sure of large shareholdings, transparency of markets, quality of
reporting, protection of small shareholders, and insider trading.
The Polish market came out as the best of the four, followed by
the Hungarian market. The Czech market came third, ahead of
the Russian market, which received the lowest score on every
dimension. The Polish market outscored the Czech market on
every dimension, with large spreads on the disclosure of owner-
ship and transparency. Consistent with this general assessment,
the International Federation of Stock Exchanges admitted the
Warsaw Exchange as a full member as early as 1994 on the
grounds that the regulation of securities markets met its stan-
dards. As of this writing, the Prague Stock Exchange still had not
been admitted even as an associate member.
Financial scandals in Poland were typically less egregious
than those in the Czech Republic, and often invited an aggressive
regulatory response. The best known Polish scandal involves a
failure of a large conglomerate, Elektrim, to reveal in a prospec-
tus an existing agreement to sell some shares in a valuable
subsidiary to a third party at below market price (allegedly as a
payment for services). When the agreement came to light, Elek-
trim’s shareholders complained, and the Securities Commission
quickly referred the case to a public prosecutor. The top manager
of Elektrim was forced to step down. The Elektrim case illus-
trates the crucial interaction between the corporate and securi-
ties law in the enforcement of investor rights. The failure by the
company to disclose possibly material information in a prospectus
was the source of the Commission’s investigation under the se-
curities law. This failed disclosure also brought about an effort by
the outside shareholders to change the board of directors using
the commercial code, which ultimately brought down the top
manager. This interplay between the securities law and the com-
pany law appears in other countries as well: the securities law
forces disclosure, which in turn invites shareholder activism us-
ing the provisions of company law.
The Polish regulator has also been aggressive in its admin-
istrative oversight of the intermediaries. In 1994 Bank Slaski,
one of the largest Polish banks which owned the largest broker at
the time, was privatized. In response to the evidence that the
brokerage arm of the bank favored the insiders in allocating
shares in this privatization, the regulators took away its broker-
age license. This was done against opposition from the Ministry of
Finance.
The available evidence shows that the Polish regulators re-
lied on the actual legal rules to protect investors; it was not just
their ideology that made a difference. In the cases we examined,
they relied on specic rules to promote disclosure that did not
exist in the Czech law, consistent with the view that reductions in
c matter. The Polish regulator was also evidently motivated to
police the market aggressively, consistent with the view that a
level of a above that of the judges may be benecial. Importantly
(and in line with the model), the Polish regulator also had the
power, and not just the motivation, to punish the violations of
rules.
TABLE VII
STOCK MARKET SIZE IN POLAND AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Market Market
captialization Cap./GDP Number of issues listed
Czech Czech
Poland Republic Poland Republic Poland Czech Republic
US $m, end of year End of year End of year

Main Parallel Main Second Free
market market Total market market market Total
1991 144 0.19% 9 0 9

1992 222 0.26% 16 0 16
1993 2706 3.15% 22 0 22 3 0 966 969
1994 3057 5938 3.30% 14.9% 44 0 44 34 0 990 1024
1995 4564 15664 3.84% 30.8% 65 0 65 62 6 1630 1698
1996 8390 18077 6.23% 32.0% 83 0 83 42 51 1535 1628
1997 12135 12786 8.95% 24.6% 143 0 143 45 58 217 320
1998 20461 12045 14.10% 24.2% 198 20 218 10 94 179 283
Sources: Polish numbers are from the International Finance Corporation 1998 and 1999 and include
National Investment Funds; Czech numbers are from the Prague Stock Exchange webpage and the Inter-
national Finance Corporation 1997 and 1999.
B. Quantitative Assessments
Table VII presents basic indicators of stock market develop-
ment in Poland and the Czech Republic. In terms of capitaliza-
tion, the Czech market in 1994 was twice as large as the Polish
market, thanks to the more than 1500 rms listed on the Prague
stock exchange as a result of privatization. As a share of GDP, the
Czech market in 1994 was ve times larger than the Polish
market. By 1998, the valuation of the Polish market increased
almost sevenfold. The valuation of the Czech market increased
until 1996, but then fell, and the market ended up at roughly
double its 1994 value. Over this period the Polish market rose to
14.1 percent of GDP, although the Czech market capitalization
remained a larger share of GDP, at 24.2 percent.
Table VII also presents the number of listed companies in
Poland and the Czech Republic. It separates the Czech companies
into those trading on the main market (most liquid), those trad-
ing on the secondary market (with more limited disclosure and
occasional trading), and those listed on the free market (with
hardly any disclosure and infrequent trading). The listed Polish
companies are separated into those trading on the main market
and those trading on the parallel (again, less liquid) market. The
FIGURE IV
Number of Stocks in IFC Investable Index in Poland and the Czech Republic
vast majority of Czech companies barely traded, and most of the

rms trading on the free market were delisted by the late 1990s.
The number of rms on the main market, having risen to 62 in
1995, fell all the way down to 10 by 1998, with most of the rms
being transferred to the less liquid secondary market. By 1998,
most listed Czech rms had been either delisted or transferred to
an exchange with only limited liquidity. In contrast, despite a
much lower initial level, the number of listed Polish rms rose
steadily over time, and hardly any rms were transferred to the
parallel market.
Figure IV reports the number of Czech and Polish stocks over
time included in the IFC Investable Index compiled by World
Bank’s International Finance Corporation, the maker of standard
emerging market indices. The IFC Investable Index generally
includes only the stocks liquid enough that foreign investors can
“practically” take positions in them. This Index for Poland started
out with 9 stocks in 1992 and rose to 34 stocks in 1998. In the
Czech Republic the Index included ve stocks in 1993 and only
thirteen in 1998. Almost all of these thirteen stocks were either
government or foreign controlled. The value of the IFC Investable
Index in Poland, having started below that in the Czech Republic,
has by the end of 1998 far surpassed it (Figure V).
Perhaps the most signicant indicator of success of a nan-
FIGURE V
Market Capitalization of Stocks in IFC Investable Index in Poland and the
Czech Republic
cial market is how effectively it enables rms to raise capital.

Table VIII presents data on the number of initial public offerings
(for cash as opposed to vouchers) in the Czech Republic and
TABLE VIII
INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERINGS (FOR CASH)
Czech Republic initial Poland initial

public offerings public offerings
Issued as Issued by Issued as Issued by

part of private part of private
privatization companies privatization companies
1991 0 0 9 —
1992 0 0 5 2
1993 0 0 4 2
1994 0 0 8 14
1995 0 0 6 15
1996 0 0 3 15
1997 0 0 10 36
1998 0 0 5 52
Total 0 0 50 136
Figures do not include the National Investment Funds that were listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange,
or public issues for vouchers in the Czech Republic.
Source: Polish data are from the Warsaw Stock Exchange; Czech data are from Pioneer investment fund.
TABLE IX
NEW LISTINGS AND EQUITY CAPITAL RAISED
NEW EQUITY C APITAL RAISED BY DOMESTIC COMPANIES MILLIONS OF U. S. DOLLARS
Czech Czech
Republic Poland Republic Poland
Total capital Total capital Total capital

raised through public raised through raised through
issues public issues public issues
Already Newly Already Newly On Prague On Warsaw

listed admitted listed admitted Stock Stock
companies companies companies companies Exchange Exchange
1996 0 0 319 67.5 0 386.5

1997 0 0 547.4 438.6 0 986
1998 0 0 818.6 328 0 1146.6
Source: International Federation of Stock Exchanges (FIBV), www.bv.com.
Poland. It also distinguishes between offerings of shares in pri-

vatizing companies coming into public ownership through ota-
tion, and offerings by new private companies—the latter being
perhaps a more effective indicator of a market’s effectiveness.
Between 1991–1998 no Czech company sold equity for cash as
part of initial privatization, whereas 50 Polish companies did. 9
This is not surprising, since the Czech Republic has followed a
noncash privatization strategy. At the same time, the data show
that no private Czech company had done an IPO on the Prague
exchange. By comparison, 136 nonprivatizing companies had
gone public on the Warsaw exchange. This is perhaps the stron-
gest evidence of the differential effectiveness of the two markets.
What about the total amount of capital raised on the stock
exchange, by both already listed and newly admitted companies?
Table IX presents the data since 1996. These numbers are more
difcult to interpret since there have been several rights offerings
in the Czech Republic, for which data are not available. The data
again show that no new or already listed Czech company raised
equity funds on the exchange through a public offering. In con-
trast, the Polish data show rapidly growing equity nancing by
both new and already listed rms. In 1998 over U. S. $1 billion of
new equity funds was raised on the Warsaw exchange.
9. A foreign-controlled mobile phone company, Ceske Radiokomunikce,

raised $134m in 1998 by issuing Global Depositary Receipts in London.
This evidence is consistent with both the reading of the laws

and the qualitative assessments. The regulated Polish stock mar-
ket grew faster, maintained greater liquidity, and has been a
better source of capital for rms than the less regulated Czech
market.
After a period of hostility toward any criticism of its policies
toward the stock market, the Czech government introduced a
number of reforms starting in 1996. These included disclosure of
blockholdings, greater regulation (through disclosure and other-
wise) of investment funds, restrictions on trading off the ex-
change, some separation of investment and commercial banking,
and nally, in April 1998, the creation of an independent Secu-
rities Commission.
VII. DISCUSSION
The quantitative and the qualitative evidence both point to
signicant problems in the Czech nancial system. Still, we only
have one comparison, and our analysis of even this case is subject
to alternative interpretations. Here we discuss some of these
interpretations.
To begin, our assessment of the Czech situation may be unduly
harsh. Overall, the Czech economy performed well during the 1990s
as the transition indicators show. Did the Czech rms simply avoid
the stock market and raise capital elsewhere?
Although we have no data showing that the lack of equity
nance has undermined investment by Czech rms, there is no
evidence of effective substitute sources of external nance. The
Czech banks have lent predominantly to the largest rms, and
have themselves been subject to governance problems and tun-
neling, as evidenced by their huge nonperforming loans. If any-
thing, the banking problems exacerbated rather than cured the
lack of equity nance. The venture capital industry is also more
developed in Poland than in the Czech Republic.
Industrial production grew faster in Poland than in the
Czech Republic. Between 1991 and 1998 the index of industrial
production fell from 113.3 to 109.7 in the Czech Republic, and
rose from 73.6 to 127.4 in Poland. Much of that growth in Poland
came from new rms, often relying on external equity nance.
More generally, the available evidence from other countries sug-
gests that stock market development is associated with faster
economic growth and better resource allocation [Levine and Zer-

vos 1998; Beck, Levine, and Loayza 2000; Wurgler 2000].
A second concern holds that the Czechs may have only fol-
lowed a different strategy of stock market development: oat all
the companies you can through privatization, and then see which
ones survive market selection. As part of becoming private, rms
could always commit, in the Coasian style, to charters that would
obligate them to treat investors well, and thus facilitate external
nance in the future. Even if the Czech strategy resulted in
massive delisting of shares and investor losses in many rms, the
ttest rms, with most market-friendly charters, survived. Such
Darwinian arguments were made by the Czech reformers in the
early 1990s. Indeed, the Czech market still has more listed com-
panies than Poland’s, and their aggregate value is still higher as
a share of GDP. Is this approach to market development obvi-
ously inferior?
We believe that it is. In the 1990s the Czech market saw not
some Darwinian selection of the ttest rms, but rather tunnel-
ing—the diversion (both legal and illegal) of assets from both good
and bad rms. Coasian contracts bonding rms to treat investors
well did not materialize. The survival of the theft-proof rms is
not an efcient mechanism of economic selection. The most ef-
cient rms might be the most attractive to tunnel, making them
the least rather than the most likely to survive. Such tunneling
was not expected either by the Czech reformers or the investors in
the Czech rms. Moreover, the cost of tunneling has been the
inability of both new and existing rms to raise equity capital,
which is perhaps the market’s main function. It is hard to con-
sider this outcome a success even if the government had expected
Darwinian selection.
Even if one agrees that the Czech stock market has not func-
tioned admirably, one can still object to our inference that the lack of
regulation is to blame. The leading alternative culprit is mass pri-
vatization in the Czech Republic, which led to the listing of hundreds
of rms on the stock market. But privatized rms have generally
outperformed those remaining in government hands in the Czech
Republic [Claessens 1997; Claessens and Djankov 1999; Frydman et
al. 1999] as elsewhere [Megginson and Netter 2001]. If anything,
privatization could have jump-started nancial markets. Moreover,
if the regulation had focused on intermediaries as it did in Poland in
the 1990s, the large number of listed rms would not have been a
problem so long as the number of intermediaries was small. Indeed,
much of the tunneling in the Czech Republic was perpetrated

by relatively few IPFs and related intermediaries, which could in
principle have been regulated with limited resources. Ultimately,
the arguments come back to the Czech failure to protect investors
through the regulation of intermediaries.
Assuming that the regulation of nancial markets was in-
deed inadequate in the Czech Republic, and that this inadequacy
had some costs, why has the system not adapted in other ways to
this regulatory failure? Several such adaptations come to mind.
Perhaps private associations of market participants could have
been created to enforce good conduct among members. Perhaps
the Prague Stock Exchange could design its own, private regula-
tions to protect investors, similar to those of Germany’s Neuer
Markt [Johnson 2000]. Perhaps the Czech companies could opt
into more protective legal regimes, including those abroad,
thereby committing themselves to good conduct and accessing
external nance. Perhaps the Czech companies could individual-
ize their corporate charters and incorporate good standards of
conduct into these charters: in principle, a Czech company could
agree to adhere to the Polish law in its charter. Finally, why did
the Czechs not reform their judiciary and thereby avoid the need
for regulation altogether?
An examination of the Czech record and of the experiences of
other countries points to problems with each of these adaptation
strategies. First, the Czech investment funds have indeed formed
associations. But since some of their powerful members them-
selves engaged in tunneling, these associations were not a strong
force against tunneling in the mid-1990s. The brokers in the
Czech Republic, perhaps for related reasons, were unable to form
an effective association. Second, some of the companies from the
rst wave of the Czech privatization have listed shares in Vienna
and Berlin, but none raised capital there. They listed for the
convenience of foreign traders, and the listing had no conse-
quences for corporate governance since the underlying corporate
and securities law remained Czech. Third, nonstandard corporate
charters need to be enforced by courts, whose limitations we have
already discussed. If rules from Poland are incorporated into a
charter of a Czech rm, the Czech courts still need to interpret
the Polish statutes, which even the Polish courts have trouble
doing. In a world of limited judicial enforcement, customized
charters are hardly a solution to the corporate governance
problem.
The argument, then, boils down to the possibility of radical

improvement of the courts, increases in b in the language of the
model. As we have argued in Section III, transition economies
still have a long way to go before their judiciaries achieve the
efciency levels of those in rich industrial countries. In the mean-
time, and consistent with the model, regulation can serve as a
substitute for the judicial enforcement of private contracts and
laws.
VIII. THE CASE OF HUNGARY

As a secondary check on our approach, we briey consider
nancial regulation and market development in Hungary, an-
other rapidly reforming East European transition economy. Hun-
gary started the transition slightly poorer than the Czech Repub-
lic, but received similar high scores on reform as Poland and the
Czech Republic. Hungary relied more heavily than the other two
countries on sales of control to foreigners in privatization—a
choice that inuenced its securities markets. On the quality of the
justice system, the 1996 Global Competitiveness Report gave
Hungary the score of 2.92, indistinguishable from Poland and the
Czech Republic. Gray et al. [1993] have the same complaints
about the Hungarian judiciary as they do about the Czech and
Polish judiciaries. The 1997 World Competitiveness Yearbook,
however, gave Hungary a sharply higher score of 5.54 than it
gave the other two countries, although still signicantly lower
than those of the rich industrial countries. The comparison with
Hungary is not as clean an experiment as the comparison of
Poland and the Czech Republic, but it does add some data.
Hungary reformed its corporate law in 1988, and securities
law in 1990, a bit earlier than the other two countries. Its share-
holder rights score is 2, the same as the Czech Republic and a
point below Poland. In its regulation of securities markets, Hun-
gary falls clearly between the two countries. Unlike Poland, and
like the Czech Republic, it had almost no regulations of individual
brokers and none of investment advisors. Hungary regulated
brokerage rms more strictly than the Czech Republic, but still
did not have the Polish “honest trading” requirements. Hungary
also had very weak stock market regulations, and in particular no
requirement that trading must take place on the exchange or that
the exchange must ensure a uniform market price. Hungary’s
regulation of mutual funds was between the Polish and the
Czech. On the other hand, Hungary, like Poland and unlike the
Czech Republic, had relatively strict regulation of custodian
banks. With respect to the issuers of securities, Hungary, like
Poland, required permission of the regulator to bring a new issue
to the market, as well as a prospectus. It only required annual
reporting of nancial information and no disclosure of ownership,
however. In sum, Hungary regulated securities markets far more
thoroughly than the Czech Republic, but not as pervasively in
some important dimensions as Poland. Consistent with this as-
sessment of the legal rules, the Budapest Stock Exchange was
admitted only to associate membership of the International Fed-
eration of Stock Exchanges—not as good as the full membership
granted to the Warsaw Exchange, but better than the outright
exclusion of the Prague Stock Exchange.
What about the development of the stock market? Hungary
actually exceeded both Poland and the Czech Republic in the ratio
of market capitalization to GDP, which stood at 29.2 percent
in 1998. This ratio, however, reected foreign control and high
valuation of the largest rms, including the phone company con-
trolled by Ameritech and Deutsche Telekom which accounted for
half of the aggregate stock market value. At the end of 1998,
Hungary had only 55 listed companies, fewer than either of the
other two countries. Of the 59 rms that had listed on the Hun-
garian market by 1998 (four subsequently delisted), 54 did so as
part of privatization and did not raise any funds. Only ve were
new private rms, and three of them were foreign-controlled. This
compares favorably with the Czech Republic, but falls far short of
the Polish success. The Hungarian companies raised about $80
million between 1997 and 1998 in the equity market, compared
with over $2 billion raised by the Polish rms.
Although Hungary differs from Poland and the Czech Repub-
lic in some potentially important respects, this evidence is con-
sistent with our approach. Hungary’s stricter regulation of mar-
kets than that in the Czech Republic (as well as signicant
foreign control) paid off in a higher market valuation, as well as
some equity market access for new rms, but it had not experi-
enced the huge success with securities markets seen in Poland.
IX. CONCLUSION
Our analysis leads to three conclusions. First, the evidence
corroborates recent research arguing that nancial markets are
helped by the legal protection of outside investors— both share-

holders and creditors—from expropriation by issuers and nan-
cial intermediaries. This indeed has been the focus of the Polish
nancial regulations in their emphasis on disclosure and the
administrative oversight of the intermediaries.
Second, the evidence is consistent with the prediction of the
model that an important element of investor protection is the
disclosure of information by issuers and intermediaries. Such
disclosure is often mandated by securities laws, which thus play
a key role in investor protection. The benets of disclosure are
both to reduce the cost to the regulators (and judges) of getting
informed, and to enable private corporate governance mecha-
nisms to function more effectively.
Third, and most generally, the analysis bears on a crucial
question in law and economics: who should enforce laws or con-
tracts? We establish the conditions under which regulatory en-
forcement presents an attractive alternative to judicial enforce-
ment. In emerging markets, where the costs of verifying the
circumstances of specic cases and interpreting statutes are high,
judges may not be sufciently motivated to enforce legal rules.
Enforcement by regulators, with more lopsided but powerful in-
centives, may then be a more efcient way to protect property
rights. The Polish regulation of securities markets presents one
example of such evidently benecial regulation taking place in
precisely the circumstances suggested by our model.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND NBER

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND NBER
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Coase Vs Coasians

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COASE VERSUS THE COASIANS*

Who should enforce laws or contracts: judges or regulators? Many Coasians,

* We thank Alberto Alesina, Simeon Djankov, Oliver Hart, Louis Kaplow,

On the face of it, the Coasians’ argument is powerful. Yet it

incentives also have the potential cost of excessively aggressive

2. Coase [1988, pp. 117–118] recognized that regulation may be preferred to

security delistings and a notable absence of equity nance

II. A M ODEL OF ENFORCEMENT INCENTIVES

tion had taken place. We think of c as a personal cost to the

Not Punish Punish Probability

search. We refer to the strategy of letting everyone go regardless

3. Note that if a > b, the only equilibrium outcome is abuse.

tions. First, we can think of c as a measure of the efciency of the

enthusiasm for the high-powered enforcement incentives as it

punishing the innocent (resulting from abuse). As a consequence,

search and leniency, and choose them in proportions that make

of “true justice,” which is perhaps provided by judges truly inde-

innocent. Presumably, in the cases where punishing the innocent

the greater success of nancial development in Poland than in the

III. INITIAL CONDITIONS

Czech Czech Czech

Transition Transition Transition

Scale is from 1 (no reform) to 4+ (full reform).

mid-1993) and 1993 (completed in 1994). Most rules of privatiza-

4. In 1997 the EBRD gave Poland a 3+ relative to the Czech Republic’s 3 on

Czech Czech Czech Czech

EBRD 1997 1996 1995

Czech Republic received scores of 5 out of 10, compared with 7.5

IV. COMPANY LAW

Proxy-by-mail No Article 405 (proxy 0 No Article 185 0

Oppressed Yes Articles 409 and 1 Yes Can protest 1

Cumulative voting Yes Article 379 1 No Articles 186 and 0

board member to employees

Denitions used in Panel A

commercial codes. Neither country allows proxy-by-mail (score

Poland Czech Republic

Further rights of No Art. 404: can No Can set max votes

In summary, Poland’s company law is somewhat more pro-

V. SECURITIES LAW AND REGULATION

in Securities and Trust Funds” was adopted on March 22, 1991,

countries is in the emphasis on the regulation of intermediaries.

Poland Czech Republic

Licensed by securities Yes Articles 18.2 Yes Section 49

Licensed by securities Yes Article 18.2 Yes Section 45

Poland Czech Republic

Licensed by securities Yes Article 33 No Not mentioned in

Trading must take place on Section 50 of the

No more than 5% of the

Custodian banks (for mutual funds)

All fund assets must be

ment advisors; the Polish law contained substantial regulations,

ensure some transparency in trading. The Czech law did not

Poland Czech Republic

Regulation of listed companies

Constraints on purchasers/potential controlling shareholders

ownership without disclosure

Threshold at which must make general offer

powers resulting from the right to

security delistings and a notable absence of equity nance

tions. First, we can think of c as a measure of the efciency of the

the greater success of nancial development in Poland than in the

Denitions used in Panel A

cial market is how effectively it enables rms to raise capital.

Source: International Federation of Stock Exchanges (FIBV), www.bv.com.