Transition in Central Europe is four years old. State firms which dominated the economy are struggling with market forces. A new private sector quickly emerged and has taken hold. Unemployment, which did not exist, is high and still increasing. Will this process of transition accelerate, or slow...

Eastern European countries have experienced sharp declines in real GDP since 1990. One of the reasons for this decline is the Soviet trade shock, deriving from the collapse of the CMEA and of traditional export markets in the Soviet Union. This paper is an attempt to quantify the magnitude of...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

This paper assesses the prospects of a 2021 time bomb in SME failures triggered by the generous support policies enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Policies implemented in 2020, on their own, do not create a 2021 "time-bomb" for SMEs. Rather, business failures and policy costs remain...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...