Global Shocks Regimes Inducing the Law Firm's Structural Shifts Between Limited versus Unlimited Liability: The Nature of Uncertainty Effect
Description
The dataset supports the study “Global Shock Regimes Inducing the Law Firm’s Structural Shifts Between Limited versus Unlimited Liability” and contains cross-country observations of newly founded law firms used to examine whether firms adopt limited-liability (LL) or unlimited-liability (UL) organisational forms at entry. The main dependent variable is a binary indicator for LL versus UL structure, while the key explanatory variables capture exposure to four global shock regimes: FATF, WTO, the 2008 global financial crisis, and COVID-19. The dataset also includes legal-origin classification distinguishing common-law from civil-law systems, interaction terms between global shock regimes and legal origin, and control variables such as birth-year frequency, city/national cluster ratio, capital-city location, male/female top-management-team ratio, and cultural dimensions including uncertainty avoidance. The data are used to estimate logit, probit, and DiD-style event-window models testing how global shocks reshape law-firm entry modes across institutional contexts. The reported sample includes approximately 49,989 to 57,571 firm-level observations, depending on model specification and variable availability.
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Steps to reproduce
Steps to reproduce the data: First, compile a cross-country sample of newly founded law firms from business-register or firm-level databases, retaining both active and inactive firms to avoid survivorship bias. Second, classify each firm’s founding structure as limited liability (LL = 1) if it is incorporated, such as private/public limited company, and unlimited liability (UL = 0) if it is a sole proprietorship, partnership, or equivalent non-incorporated form. Third, record each firm’s founding year, country, city, capital-city status, city/national cluster ratio, birth-year frequency, and male/female top-management-team ratio. Fourth, assign each country a legal-origin category, coding common-law = 1 and civil-law = 0. Fifth, construct four global shock regime indicators using the onset years: FATF = 1989, WTO = 1995, Global Financial Crisis = 2008, and COVID-19 = 2020. Sixth, create regime-specific pre/post event-window variables, coding firms founded before each onset as 0 and firms founded in or after the onset year as 1, while excluding later overlapping shock periods to keep each comparison clean. Seventh, add country-level control variables, especially cultural dimensions such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance, individualism, and masculinity. Finally, merge all variables into a firm-year dataset and estimate logit, probit, and DiD-style event-window models predicting LL versus UL adoption, including interaction terms between each post-shock indicator and common-law legal origin.
Institutions
- Liaoning UniversityLiaoning, Shenyang