At the heart of the debate about public versus private ownership lie three questions: 1) Does competition matter more than ownership? 2) Are state enterprises more subject to welfare-reducing interventions by government than private firms are? 3) Do state enterprises suffer more from governance...

This paper introduces a large new cross-country database on political institutions: the Database on Political Institutions (DPI). The authors summarize key variables (many of them new), compare this data set with others, and explore the range of issues for which the data should prove invaluable....

Transition economies have introduced a range of OECD active labor market policies to combat unemployment - albeit often on paper only, as with rising unemployment passive policies have crowded out active ones. But even in the Czech Republic, active labor market policies have contributed only...