This paper makes some selective comparisons of the empirical evidence relating to financial discipline and soft budget constraints in the enterprise sector in China and the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (CEEFSU). The paper finds that: (1) in both...

According to more recent theories on the optimal capital structure, the availability of external financing is not always guaranteed, or it may come at different costs, depending on the methods of financing used (debt vs. equity, long-term debt vs. short-term debt, etc.). Under such...

The paper examines Hungary''s experience with banking and bankruptcy reform in the period 1992-94. The first part of the paper uses enterprise-level data to show that in 1992, the same year in which the amount of classified loans in the state-owned commercial banks grew enormously, the...

We use evidence from a survey of approximately 200 Polish state-owned, privatized, and de novo private manufacturing firms to investigate the nature and scope of enterprises-level provision of social benefits, and in particular how enterprise-level social provision is changing with transition,...

This paper reports the main findings from a survey of some 200 Polish firms carried out at the end of 1993. The central focus is on the relationship between different emerging forms of ownership and the extent and nature of enterprise level adjustments taking place. Four broad categories of...

We use a rich personnel data set from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to analyze how the financial crisis in 1998 and the resulting change in external labour market conditions affect the wages and the welfare of workers inside a firm. We provide evidence that large shocks to external...

Using a firm level dataset from four regions of Russia covering 1996/97, an investigation was carried out into how the surplus created within the firm is divided between profits and wages. An efficient bargaining framework based on the work of Svejnar (1986) is employed which takes into account...

We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...