Eastern Europe is not well served with straightforward textbook advice. The common wisdom on privatization fails to address the problems created by diffuse ownership and control prior to privatization. Cash auctions may not efficiently match managers and capital stock because of wealth...

Governments throughout Eastern Europe have been singularly unsuccessful in dealing with large loss-making SOEs. A more promising approach would create an incentive framework and legal environment where the SOE's major non-government creditor can take the lead in initiating restructuring and the...

This paper uses the sequencing of privatisation to infer the objective pursued by the Polish government in the privatisation of its large manufacturing firms in the second half of the 1990's. We construct a model of mixed oligopoly, and use it to evaluate the privatisation process; our analysis...