The early literature critical of the European Monetary Union feared the effects of asymmetric shocks on an area with little intercountry labor mobility and no common fiscal policy. Yet, asymmetric behavior, rather than asymmetric shocks, appears to be at the root of present difficulties....

The German economy is recovering hesitantly from the sharp post-unification boom and recession. Two features of recent West German performance are novel: there has been an unprecedented loss of jobs in industry, and manufacturing profitability has been pushed to its lowest level ever and is now...

Following the collapse of planning, new small and medium-sized firms rapidly emerged in all transition economies. Using firm level data, we investigate the interaction between the widespread opportunities for new business activities such firms faced and their business environment. The business...

This paper uses a new data-set to examine how internal capital markets and foreign ownership affect investment. Our data allow us to compare investment behaviour of listed subsidiaries with stand-alone firms while controlling for investment opportunities of parent and subsidiary firms. We...

We use data from over 20,000 firms in 60 countries to identify constraints on the growth offirms. We interpret managers´ answers to survey questions on the extent to which variousaspects of their external environment inhibit the performance of their firm as measuring theshadow cost of...

This paper provides new evidence on progress in transition and the "readiness" of enterprises for accession for the EU using a detailed survey administered to approximately 200 manufacturing firms in each of Poland, Romania, and Spain. A major innovation is the use of a market economy and member...

This paper uses a survey of 3,300 firms in 25 transition countries to shed light on the factors that influence restructuring by firms and their subsequent performance as measured by growth in sales and in sales per employee over a three-year period. We begin by surveying what a decade of...

Transition has entailed the introduction of policies to stimulate product market competition, to establish effective corporate governance and to harden enterprise budget constraints. How do these policies interact? Are they substitute policy instruments or does one policy reinforce the effect of...