We avoid these difficulties by taking a long-horizon approach. We combine a large set of governance provisions into an index which proxies for the strength of shareholder rights, and then study the empirical relationship between this index and corporate performance. Our analysis should be thought of as a "long-run event study": we have democracies and dictatorships, the rules stayed mostly the same for a decade-how did each type do? Our main results are to demonstrate that, in the 1990s, democracies earned significantly higher returns, were valued more