Is investment constrained more by insecure property rights or by limited external finance? For five transition economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union we find that weak property rights limit the reinvestment of profits in startup ma nufacturing firms. Access to credit does not...

The mix of formal and informal mechanisms for contract enforcement is examined using survey data from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Poland, and Slovakia. Using the size of trade credit to quantify the success of contracting, we ask: Do the courts have a perceptible effect on contracting? When can a...

Which of the democratic checks and balances - opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press -is the most critical? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks...

Germany is the laggard of Europe, yet the country is world champion in merchandise exports. The paper tries to solve this theoretical and empirical puzzle by diagnosing a “pathological export boom” and a “bazaar effect”. Excessively high wages defended by unions and the welfare state...

The paper deals with the effects of migration resulting from EU Eastern enlargement on the welfare states of Western Europe. Although migration is good in principle, as it yields gains from trade and specialization for all countries involved, it does so only if it meets with flexible labour...

Judged by the principle of intertemporal Pareto optimality, insecure property rights and the greenhouse effect both imply overly rapid extraction of fossil carbon resources. A gradual expansion of demand-reducing public policies – such as increasing ad-valorem taxes on carbon consumption or...

The eastern expansion of the EU resembles German unification in its mometousness. Whereas the latter led to a 26% increase in the population of the Federal Republic, the former will increase the population of the EU by 28% if all ten entry aspirants are accepted. A special problem will be posed...

This paper reconsiders the determinants of the exchange rate by studying the historical episode after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Testing a modified portfolio balance model, we attribute the strength of the deutschmark in the early nineties and the puzzling decline of the euro during its...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the w est. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...