This paper analyses the employment adjustment of state- and privately-owned companies before and during the global crisis. Using Hungarian data, it finds that the net job creation rate is similar across the two ownership types before the crisis, but during the crisis state-owned companies have a...

Studies of public-private and foreign-domestic wage differentials face difficulties distinguishing ownership effects from correlated characteristics of workers and firms. This paper estimates these ownership differentials using linked employer-employee data (LEED) from Hungary containing 1.35mln...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

With the help of a peculiar institutional feature of early Romanian privatization, when a group of firms was explicitly banned to become private, we test which factors contributed to the selection of firms into long-term state ownership. We find that politicians sheltered large and inefficient...