Value-added in Russian banks grew by 43 "per cent" while GDP declined by 32 "per cent" in the early years of the transition in Russia. This paper offers explanations for the unusual success of the Russian banking sector and the determinants of individual bank performance. The evidence comes from...

This paper follows through an aspect of microeconomic restructuring in Hungary during the transition period. This restructuring brought about substantial changes in the behaviour of all economic agents. Our study combines labour market and corporate financial information to explore the effect of...

Disposable income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient and using the "Family Budget Survey" data, increased very little, and by a similar amount, from 1989 to 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This surprising result is examined with an analysis of changes in the channels of...

The active monitoring of enterprises is an important aspect of the transformation of Russian firms into efficient, commercially viable entities. This paper uses detailed case study evidence to provide insights into the mechanisms and processes adopted by investment funds, as equity holders; and...

This paper examines case study evidence of large Slovak firms chosen to represent a wide range of initial conditions, privatization techniques and success with restructuring. We document the ownership changes and restructuring actions of firms. We then re-examine several hypotheses about firm...

This paper reports an investigation into the changes in the wage distribution in Poland in the first half of the 1990s. We concentrate on the effects of privatization and international trade. We show that the tendency towards increased dispersion in wages halted between 1992 and 1996, despite a...

Few developments are more significant in transitional economics than the development of organized commodity and financial markets. Working from a transaction costs framework, this paper analyses a set of these markets, the Russian commodity exchanges, and their attempts to order trade in...

Because of the political importance of stable and affordable food prices, governments in transitional economies in Europe and Asia fkequently struggle to balance the desire to maintain state controls in the rural sector with the goal of promoting market development and privatizing or...