Twenty Years of 'Law and Finance': Time to Take Law Seriously

The Law and Finance School (LFS) has become an important stream of research in management and socio-economic studies. This paper provides the first comprehensive discussion of the first twenty years of LFS literature. Drawing on legal theory, we show that, despite the centrality of law to the LFS, the LFS is based on a surprisingly ‘thin’ theory of law. It does not provide a coherent definition of what primary function law plays in the economy,...