Economic unification forced an unprecedented adjustment crisis on the East German economy. The revolutionary shock of the transformation of the economic order was reinforced by a real appreciation shock exceeding 50%, due to the immediate introduction of the Deutschmark. This paper examines in...

Eastern Europe is engaged in a massive programme of financial reform. This paper argues that while this programme has many desirable features, it has failed to address some of the most basic issues. These concern the relationship between the financial system and the enterprise sector, and the...

This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained. Finally,...

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labour supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting...

This paper analyses the ownership structure emerging from the Russian privatization process, using information from a sample survey of 439 state and privately-owned manufacturing companies conducted in July 1994, just after the voucher programme was completed. The Russian ownership structure...

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...

The 'big-bang' liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analysing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyse 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of...