We analyse politically motivated privatization design in a bipartisan environment where politicians lack commitment power. Suppose the median class voters a priori favour redistributive policies. If the privatization programme succeeds in allocating enough shares to these citizens, they become...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child-labour regulation, based on two key mechanisms. First, parental decisions on family size interact with their preferences for child-labour regulation. Second, the supply of child labour affects skilled and unskilled wages. If policies are...

Group 1 holds political power. Group 2 threatens this power. Group 1 decreases the upheaval probability by co-opting some agents from Group 2 into a more benign Group 3. Improvements in upheaval technology lead to less co-optation. Increasing the relative size of Group 1 implies larger...

We develop a novel Bayesian pooling technique to estimate aggregate production functions for the previously centrally planned economies (PCPEs) of Eastern Europe and for Western economies, as well as for a group of developing countries. This technique adjusts for the low quality of the PCPE data...

This paper interprets the existing evidence on enterprise restructuring in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Despite differences in restructuring policies, the pattern of observed restructuring appears similar in the three countries. Contrary to initial expectations, managers of SOEs have...

This paper looks at the behaviour of large industrial firms in Poland in 1988–94. Using a longitudinal enterprise-level data set, we are able to test systematically various hypotheses concerning firms’ reactions to the change in their environment. The results confirm a structural break after...

A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization...