Journal articles

Vishny has authored and co-authored dozens of peer-reviewed articles including:

• Vishny, Robert W, & LaPorta, R. & Lopez-de-Silanes, F. & Shleifer, A. Law and Finance, Journal of Political Economy, 1998, 106(6), pp. 1113.
• Vishny, Robert W. & Shleifer, A. A Survey of Corporate Governance, Journal of Finance, 1997, 52(2), pp. 737–83.
• Vishny, Robert W. & Shleifer, A. The Limits of Arbitrage, Journal of Finance, 1997, 52(1), pp. 35–55.
• Vishny, Robert W. & Lakonishok, J. & Shleifer, A. Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation and Risk, Journal of Finance 1994, 49(5), pp. 1541–78.
• Vishny, Robert W. & Shleifer, A. Large Shareholders and Corporate Control, Journal of Political Economy, 1986, 94(3, Part 1), pp. 461–88.

The 1997 A Survey of Corporate Governance article broke free from the existing academic literature, which had mainly although not exclusively focused on corporate governance in the U.S., specifically the takeover market. Instead, this article by Shleifer and Vishny addressed the bigger question of why so many countries around the world had almost non-existant public equity (stock) markets, in comparison to the U.S., U.K., Japan, and a relatively small number of other countries in which selling stock to the general public was comparatively widespread. They noted that in many countries without active public capital markets, family firms are more important, and bank loans are a major source of external financing.

The framework that they used in their A Survey of Corporate Governance article led Shleifer and Vishny, along with two of Shleifer's doctoral students, LaPorta and Lopez-de-Silanes (LLSV), to publish their 1998 Law and Finance article. In this article, LLSV hypothesized that countries with a legal system based on British common law had legal systems that were more supportive of a governance structure that gave minority shareholders (that is, shareholders that each own only a small percentage of the shares) adequate protection to prevent a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and/or majority shareholder from expropriating them. They hypothesized that countries with a legal system based on the French civil law system did not provide as much protection, and thus outside shareholders would be less willing to buy stock in a company. Not all countries neatly fit into one of these two categories, but in a long series of highly cited papers, LLSV have provided empirical evidence that common law countries such as the U.S. have much more successful stock markets. In recent years, U.S. publicly trade corporations have distributed approximately $1 trillion per year in cash to their shareholders.^[3]