This Paper uses a unique representative firm level data set to analyse the effect of domestic and international competitive pressure and ownership changes in three emerging economies, Bulgaria Poland and Romania. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Domestic competitive pressure,...

The 'big-bang' liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analysing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyse 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of...

In this Paper we analyse the impact of product market competition and ownership structure on corporate performance. We focus on the firms listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which are either privatised or newly created firms. First, we study the separate effects of competition and ownership...

We study the incentives to firms to create divisions once the vertical structure of an industry is taken into account. Downstream firms, those that must buy an essential input from upstream firms, may create divisions. Divisionalization reduces their bargaining power against upstream firms. This...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

While innovation is argued to create value, private incentives of firms to innovate are driven by what part of the value created firms can appropriate. In this paper we explore the relation between innovation and the markups a firm is able to extract after innovating. We estimate firm-specific...

We disentangle the contribution of unobserved heterogeneity in idiosyncratic demand and productivity to firm growth. We use a model of monopolistic competition with Cobb-Douglas production and a dataset of Italian manufacturing firms containing unique information on firm-level prices to reach...

This paper estimates the effects of the 1991 breakups of Czechoslovak state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on subsequent performance of the master enterprises and the spin-off units. The analysis is based on quarterly and annual data of Czechoslovak industrial enterprises. We estimate the performance...

We study competition between a dealer (OTC) market and a limit order market. In the limit order market, investors can choose to be "makers" (post limit orders) or "takers" (hit limit orders) whereas in the dealer market they must trade at dealers' quotes. Moreover, in the limit order market,...

Understanding the development of chainstores is important given the large GDP share of services and the continuing importance of chains in bringing these services to market. Service chains provide a puzzle because they take a long time to develop even when there are obvious expansion...