Robert Vishny

Vishny is best known for his research on corporate governance, law and finance, and behavioral finance, much of it co-authored with Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University. Their work examined how weak investor protections and poor legal enforcement enable corporate insiders to expropriate minority shareholders.

Vishny is a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has spent most of his academic career. He is one of the most cited financial economists in the world.

Published in 1998, 'The Grabbing Hand: Government Pathologies and Their Cures' analyzed how government intervention often serves private interests rather than correcting market failures. Shleifer and Vishny argued that many regulations exist to enable rent extraction by officials rather than to address genuine externalities.

Yes, Vishny was the 'V' in the LLSV collaboration with La Porta, López-de-Silanes, and Shleifer, which produced the landmark late-1990s papers linking legal origins to financial development. The LLSV research showed empirically that common law countries provide stronger investor protections than French civil law countries.