During the transition from plan to market, managers and politicians succeeded in maintaining control of large parts of the stock of socialist physical capital. Despite the obvious importance of this phenomenon, there have been no efforts to model, measure and investigate this process...

Post-privatization restructuring of former state-owned enterprises (FSOEs) encompasses both shorter-run "defensive" actions and longer-run "strategic" measures. Restructuring involves changes in corporate governance, organizational structure, management, labor, capital, technology, output, and...

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,...

We examine financial constraints and forms of finance used for investment, by analysing survey data on 157 large privatised companies in Hungary and Poland for the period 1998 – 2000. The Bayesian analysis using Gibbs sampling is carried out to obtain inferences about the sample companies’...

This paper examines the determinants of wage pressure in large companies, including ownership characteristics and the impact of regional labour markets. By using a panel of 329 Polish largest firms during the period 1997- 2001, we find evidence of rent sharing activities, however there is also...

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...

The paper suggests a methodology for evaluation of a direct and indirect property distribution and of a transparency of a property structure in an economy. The methodology is applied on the analysis of property structure of the banking sector in the Czech Republic.

This paper examines the determinants of employment changes using a panel of Polish large firms during the period 1996-2001. We investigate the impact of wages, output growth, investment, firm size and sectors upon employment, focusing on the asymmetry hypothesis. We find that investment plays an...

A multitude of explanations for low investment by Russian firms have been offered: high inflation, high interest rates, falling production, falling GDP, an underdeveloped banking system, a confiscatory tax regime, calls for the re-nationalization of industry, excessive regulations, and an...

Due to the persistence of relatively soft budget constraints and poor government credibility, the survival strategy of Romanian state-sector firms means eschewing profit maximization in the short run in favor of insider utility maximization. This takes the form of attempts at both reducing...