It's always nice to get published, and this article has been waiting in line at ARSP for about a year to get printed so it was nice to finally see it inked

http://www.steiner-verlag.de/ARSP/ARSP3_09.html

This article demonstrates the effect of legal self-efficacy on the use of sanctions against defaulting clients. The follow-up Legal self-efficacy and Business Risk is in the pipeline and I hope to have it finalized by next week. I will post it here for those of you eager to know the nature of legal self-efficacy and its effect on businessmens' behavior.

The internet is fantastic when it comes to sharing material. I now share all of the six papers so far planned to be part of my thesis you can download them  here. 

Three papers are about legal self efficacy:

1. Legal Effectiveness: Theoretical Developments Concerning Legal Transplants.  Published in Archiv für Rechts und Sozialphilosophie (4) 2005.

2. Legal Self-efficacy and Managers' Use of Law.  Accepted for publication in Archiv für Rechts und Sozialphilosophie 2009.

3. The Law Businessman and the Trade Credit Decision. Published in The Uppsala Yearbook of East European Law (2008), p 226-266.

The remaining three are on the interrelation between legal rules and capital structure:

4. Legal Rights Matter: Evidence from Paneld Data on Creditor Protection and Debt. Published in International Finance Review 2008 (9) p. 303-336.

5. Capital Structure, Legal Rights, and Legal Origin. Presented on numerous conferences in Europea and the US.

6. The Structure of Ownership in Europe. Presented on numerous conferences in Europea and the US.

I am currently writing the seventh paper Legal Self-efficacy and the Protection of Property Rights as presented in the abstract below.

Feel free to download the papers and read them. I welcome your comments!

Anyone doing research on self-efficacy?  I would like to exchange some ideas on this topic. 

My tedious research process: here it is, I might need help to improve it.  I am now writing my seventh paper for the dissertation and I am going through this procedure right now.

1. Find an interesting topic.

2. Find a theory you like to support

3. Find empirical support of the theory.

4. Read all there is to read about the topics involved in the paper.  For this paper this step has rendered me reading two strands of literature on Behavioural Law and Economics which I read in October, and the second strand is risk literature. I decided that I should include it since my paper is:

Legal Self-efficacy and the Protection of Property Rights

Eastern Europe is plagued by dysfunctional legal systems which don’t seem to provide reliable protection of property rights. Previous research has focused on the improvement of legal institutions such as courts and legal texts to adress this problem. This paper takes another approach to providing reliable protection of property rights in countries with dysfunctional legal systems by devising a new theory of the legal consciousness that applies to managers as the end users of law. The concept is called Legal self-efficacy (LSE). It is a measure of managers’ belief in their ability to use law as a tool for communication when doing business. In this paper I demonstrate that that LSE has a significant and positive impact on managers’ protection of property rights in terms of customer risk and managers’ protection against government nationalisation. The paper devises a new model that shows how LSE is related to a reduction of risk perception in the protection of property rights. The policy implications is that managers can be taught to improve their legal self-efficacy. Reliable protection of property rights in Eastern Europe can be improved by boosting the legal consciousness of managers. LSE is a legal effectiveness in a distributed sense, proving that law is effective only if it is in contact with society.

and the paper needs to incorporate a model. I have not done this previously, but I thougth it would be nice to bring something novel to the literature of behavioral law and economics. The paper connects risk literature to my concept LSE (see above).

5. Make the model look nice and beleivable.

6. Write the preconditions of the model and all previous research. 

7. Fill in the remainder of the paper including: introduction, presentation of problem, previous research, methodology, hypotheses including tests,  results,  summary and discussion, possibly even theoretical implications.

8. Read the paper

9. Reread the paper

10. Let someone else read the paper, and at least two more. 

11. Make changes. 

12. Read the paper again. 

13. Make changes. 

14. Read the paper. 

15. Submit to a journal in the proper format.

Cumbersome? Yes. Any tips?

Curious about the interrelationship between law, legal families and debt structure?

Here's a paper my American colleague and I wrote 

Legal Rights Matter: Evidence from Panel Data on Creditor Protection and Debt published 2008 in volume 9 of International Finance Review. You can download it here.

At the outset of writing my thesis, this was what interested me most. However, in 2004-5 I realised that I could use a novel approach to show that it's people's understanding of the law that influences their use of law and decisions concering protection of their property rights. Therefore I decided to study the legal consciousness of the end users of law - entrepreneurs to find that there is a significant effect of legal consciousness on transactional behavior.

The papers on this issue you cannot download now, I will make them available soon.

Want to do research and publish? - great - get the Why and the How from mr Schulman

Can't help laughing from readin this. But then again, it's only research.

The simple logic of legal self-efficacy explained in brief

Here's the argument of my seventh paper.  I have written three papers on legal self-efficacy - and in this fourth one I have decided that I need to connect this concept with a discussion of risk. So now I read like ten papers and books on the subject - here are my tentative findings:

1. Risk is the product of likelihood of an event + consequences of that event. 

2. Subjective risk is the individual's perception of  risk and depends on the subjective probability of a particular event or performance of a task and the subjective dealing with the consequences of that event. Objective risk is the risk as measured by independent and recurrent calculations of a similar event. 

3. Self-efficacy is the belief of an individual in his/her own ability to performa  certain task.  This belief has an effect on the risk perception on that particular task. Therfore the person has a lower subjective risk of the task. In turn, the person is more likely not to shy away from carrying out that task. 

Ergo:

4. Legal self-efficacy lowers the subjective risk of an individual when making decisions about legal and financial transactions which themselves are a  risk.

Simple enough?  I think so. Simple is good. 

Essays on Legal Self-efficacy and Finance

This is my latest preliminary title of my thesis. It feels good to have that down. Not too long. Not too short. Not too specific, not too general.

Writing a paper?

The best guide that I have found to help you do this is:

Kazdin, A. (1995) Preparing and Evaluating Research Reports.Psychological Assessment .Vol. 7, No. 3, 228-237.  

Download it here (Copyable and downloadable PDF):

Especially useful is page 232. Read it.

The most of your time and energy should be spent on the section that brings your novelty - what new findings or theories you bring to your field of research. Then literary review, method, and then introduction and conclusion.