This paper uses new firm-level data to examine the effects of breakups of the Czech firms and their subsequent privatization on corporate performance. Unlike the existing literature, which analyzes breakups almost exclusively in advanced economies, we control for accompanying ownership changes...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

This paper studies bank-failure models in the context of transition economies. In order to capture the default risk of banks, data on the structure of retail deposit rates is used to improve the prognostic quality of bank-failure prediction. The Czech bank crisis of 1994?1996, during which 14...

Informed trading is one of the key factors that can obstruct the efficient functioning of a financial market. The authors examine the extent of informed trading in the Czech Republic, where the financial market is alleged to be driven by informed trading. In applying the model developed by...

This paper uses a specific experiment — „voucher privatization“ in the former Czechoslovakia — to test the permanent income hypothesis of consumer behavior. Voucher privatization (the mass privatization of state-owned assets through publicly offered vouchers) led to an unexpected...

The paper demonstrates how survey methods and retrospective questions can be put to effective use in the study of shadow-economy dynamics; specifically, the evolution of tax evasion in the Czech Republic. The authors measure the average individual's transition between the shadow and official...

We analyze the extent of the integrated state control over the privatized companies in the Czech Republic during the decade of 1995-2005. During this period, the integrated potential of the state to control companies had a pyramid-like form. Even though the pyramid control was not fully...

We analyze effect of intraday information flow in three emerging EU stock markets-the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use five-minute intraday data on stock market index returns and 15 types of EU and U.S. macroeconomic announcements during 2004-2007. We measure each announcement as its...

The privatization strategy in many transition economies involved the creation of a special government agency that administered state property during privatization programs as well as after the privatization was declared complete. The National Property Fund (FNM) was the agency in the Czech...