This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors in emerging markets can enhance shareholder value. We pay special attention to two dimensions of investor heterogeneity: whether an investor declares itself as an activist, and whether an investor comes from a country with a strong...

In an environment in which bureaucratic burden and delay are exogenous, an individual firm may find bribes helpful to reduce the effective red tape it faces. The “efficient grease” hypothesis asserts therefore that corruption can improve economic efficiency and that fighting bribery would be...

We investigate whether the adoption of the euro was accompanied by an increase in prices in member countries, and whether it promoted goods market arbitrage in the form of faster convergence to a common price. By comparing the experience of eurozone countries to non-euro European countries in a...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but...

In general, most countries of the former Eastern bloc have experienced poor growth performance and large increases in income inequality during the transition process. The most obvious success story in the process of transition to date has been Poland, which has outstripped other transition...

Poland undertook a rapid and decisive set of political and economic reforms starting in 1989-90, a period that has become known as the big bang. A widely held view is that, in all of the transition economies, the economic upheaval associated with the process of transition has led to substantial...