It has been argued that the public sector is an insurance against otherwise uninsurable risks. If that is the case, it is reasonable to expect the public sector to be larger in regions where the private labour-market is risky. Using data from Swedish municipalities, this paper reports that...

We estimate scale elasticities in firms' money demand using panel data. Our main data set is a sample of Spanish companies observed over 1983-96. We also analyse comparable UK and US data sets. We find that the errors in money demand equations contain two terms correlated with sales: first, a...

This Paper works with a broad data sample of Czech voucher-privatized firms during 1996-99. It analyses the development of ownership structure and consequently its effect on a firm's performance Ownership concentration had been quite high in 1996 and steadily increased. The single largest owner...

This paper looks at the behaviour of large industrial firms in Poland in 1988–94. Using a longitudinal enterprise-level data set, we are able to test systematically various hypotheses concerning firms’ reactions to the change in their environment. The results confirm a structural break after...

One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. It is widely believed that competition has a positive effect on efficiency, but the theoretical and empirical support is quite scarce. The objective of this paper...

This paper analyses the determinants of the inventory to assets ratio in panel data sets of Japanese and UK firms in the period 1960–85. The analytical framework sets inventory decisions in the context of decisions by the firm about other assets and liabilities, in contrast to traditional...

This Paper reviews recent econometric work on factor models in large cross-sections of time series. In this literature, traditional factor analysis is adapted to develop parsimonious estimation methods for high dimension time series models. The review covers problems of consistency and rates –...

We study the issue of income convergence across countries and regions with a Bayesian model which allows us to use information in an efficient and flexible way. We argue that the very slow convergence rates to a common level of per-capita income found, for example, by Barro and Sala-i-Martin, is...

Recent estimates of convergence equations using panel data techniques tend to produce theoretically unpalatable results which run counter to the views prevailing in the literature. This paper argues that these results may be partly due to the difficulty of empirically separating short-term...

This Paper studies the interaction between repeated auctions of rail franchises of different lengths, uncertainty, and incentives for investment in rolling stock, following the privatization of British Rail. Theoretical predictions are tested empirically using a unique panel of data. Theory...