Economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty. Seldom have these various forms of uncertainty manifested themselves more sharply than in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the transition was especially rapid and sharp since East...

Using bank-level data from India, for nine years (1995-96 to 2003-04), we examine banks’ behavior in the context of emerging credit markets. Our results indicate that the credit market behavior of banks in emerging markets is determined by past trends, the diversity of the potential pool of...

Few researchers have examined the nature and determinants of earnings differentials among religious groups, and none has been undertaken in the context of conflict-prone multi-religious societies like the one in India. We address this lacuna in the literature by examining the differences in the...

Since 1989, there has been a sharp increase in the role of caste and religion in determining political fortunes at both state and federal levels in India. As a consequence, significant intercaste and inter-religion differences in earnings have the potential to stall the process of economic...

Although economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty, their effects are often unclear and hard to assess, in part due to the absence of suitable measures of uncertainty. Because of the numerous and very substantial institutional changes that people in the transition...

It has long been argued that private ownership of firms leads to better firm performance. However, theory as well as empirical evidence suggest that factors like agency problems may not allow privately owned firms to operate more efficiently or perform better that state owned firms. At the same...

performance. On the one hand, concentration of ownership that, in turn, concentrates management control in the hands of a strategic investor, eliminates agency problems associated with dispersed ownership. On the other hand, it may lead to entrenchment of upper management which may be...

It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored...

Foreign investors are expected to contribute to economic development through a variety of channels. However, many foreign investment operations are small, and almost insignificant in their impact on the local environment. An important indication of the potential contribution of foreign investors...

In an attempt to better understand the impact of the World Bank on human development in poor countries, we use cross-country data on African countries, for the 1990-2002 period, to examine this relationship. The coefficient estimates of our parsimonious fixed-effects models indicate that while...