Leviathan Resists: The Endogenous Relationship Between Privatisation and Firm Performance.

Using a unique panel data set of privatised cement firms in Turkey, we test the hypothesis that privatisation and firm performance are determined simultaneously in a political economy context. By focusing on the short- and medium-run joint relationship between privatisation and firm performance, we find that: i) private sector increases the output in the medium-run, but by changing the scale property of production from increasing returns-to-scale to decreasing returnsto- scale, ii) the only factor that increases the labour productivity in the short run is a decrease in labour stock, iii) the negative impact of labour growth on productivity is less severe during the privatised period, and iv) the likelihood of the privatisation of firms decreases if the number of workers employed in firms is high, if they exhibit favourable short-run performance, if the voter preference is less fractionalised and the government representation is weak in the provinces that they are located, and if they are based in socio-economically less developed regions.