3.3. Measuring institutions We use the measures for efficiency of the legal system, corruption, rule of la and strength of corporate governance reported in LLSV (1998). Efficiency of the legal system is the assessment by an independent organization, Business Inter national Corporation, of "the efficiency and integrity of the legal environment as it affects business" (LLSV, 1998, p. 1124). Corruption is an assessment b another independent organization, International Country Risk Services, o the extent of corruption in the government, particularly the extent to which busi nesses have to pay bribes. The rule of law is also an assessment by International Country Risk Services and is their opinion of the "law and order tradition" in the country (LLSV 1998, Table 1) Corporate governance is LLSV's (1998) assessment of the de jure rights of shareholders (particularly what they call anti-director" rights). LLSV (1998) also provide measures of creditor rights. The final LLSV (1998) measure we use is their index of accounting standards. The raw data and precise definitions for all these measures are reported in Table 3 All of these measures are calculated well before the Asian crisis. Efficiency of the legal system pertains to 1980-83. The measures of corruption and law and order cover 1982-95. The measures of corporate governance are calculated primarily using data for the early and mid-1990s n their Global Emerging Markets (June, 1998) Flemings Research develops an alternative measure of corporate governance across emerging markets. They asked their country specialists to consider "the disclosure of information, trans parency of ownership structures, management and special interest groups, adequacy of the legal system, whether the standards that are set are actually enforced, and if the boards of companies are independent and the rights of minority shareholders are upheld" (p. 19). This index therefore tries to capture the extent of shareholder rights in practice. The index runs from one to five with a higher score meaning more rights and they note that "a score of 5 would be awarded to the US our model market" (p. 20). One disadvantage of this measure is that it was published in spring 1998, and therefore could in part reflect reassessments of shareholder rights in light of the Asian crisis We test the importance of alternative measures of macroeconomic policy and institutional structure using regressions with the change in the value of the nominal exchange rate on the left-hand side. We then test the leading contenders using additional control variables and in multiple regressions. Our regressions include a dummy variable for being in East Asia, in case there is an Asian-specific element to the crisis (e.g., countries are affected just because they