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...

This paper studies the impact of corruption on inward foreign direct investment using a unique firm-level data set. It examines two effects of corruption simultaneously: a reduction in the volume of foreign investment and a shift in the ownership structure. Corruption makes local bureaucracy...

This paper studies the effect of corruption on foreign direct investment. The sample covers bilateral investment from fourteen source countries to forty-five host countries during 1990-91. There are three central findings. (1) A rise in either the tax rate on multinational firms or the...

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...

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 analyzes the evolution of inequality in Polandduring the economic transition that began in 1989?1990. Using microdatafrom the Household Budget Surveys, we find that, after a brief spike in1989, income and consumption inequality actually declined to belowpretransition levels during...

Conventional empirical models of monetary policy transmission in emerging market economies produce puzzling results: monetary tightening often leads to an increase in prices (the price puzzle) and depreciation of the currency (the FX puzzle). We show that incorporating forward-looking...

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...

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...

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...