Despite its tremendous influence in both academic and policy circles, the empirical estimates from the legal origins literature are simply not credible. The cross sectional research designs used surely suffer from omitted variables biases. As an illustration of this, we showed how La Porta et al.’s (2008) results, which supposedly showed robustness, are extremely fragile. This is a symptom of a poorly identified relationship. While the legal origins literature raises important, perhaps among the most important, questions, these questions are not amenable to serious empirical examination.”

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