Since the fall of communism, the former Soviet Union experienced a strong output decline and a dramatic increase in arrears and barter. We develop a model which explains how these three phenomena are connected. We introduce liquidity and credit constraints into a model of disorganization and...

Banks play a central role in financing and monitoring Firms intransition economies. We study how bank competition affects theefficiency of the credit allocation, the monitoring of firms, and thefirms’ restructuring effort. In our model, banks compete to finance aninvestment project with...

We develop a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. We show that downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while upstream conditions mainly affect the...

This paper investigates how multinational firms choose the capital structure of their foreign affiliates in response to political risk. We focus on two choice variables, the leverage and the ownership structure of the foreign affiliate, and we distinguish different types of political risk, such...

The privatization process in Eastern Europe has not been a success everywhere. The opinion or experts about the optimal privatization strategy has changed over the last decade. This article first presents the theoretical foundation for privatizing state-owned enterprises. It then discusses the...

We investigate how bank competition affects the efficiency of credit allocation, using a model of spatial competition. Our analysis shows that bad loans are more likely the larger the number of banks competing for customers. We study further how many banks will be active if market entry is not...

This paper studies the strategic interaction between a foreign direct investor and a host country. We analyze how the investor can use his control rights to protect his investment if he faces the risk of \"creeping expropriation\" once his investment is sunk. It is shown that this hold-up...