The economic reforms in Tanzania and Vietnam represent the two typical cases of transition economies in Asia and Africa, particularrly the transformation of the two developing economies from the planned to the market mechanism. In this paper, the two authors, Brian - a British economist and Dinh...

The paper tests the proposition that money generates value in trade. It examines the data for 5,746 Russian companies for 1997 and finds that money accounts for 24.6 percent of their value-added. The functional form of the return on money in trade is determined to be positive and marginally...

The paper applies a non-parametric approach, i.e. data envelopment analysis (DEA), to assess the relative technical efficiency of higher education across countries, with a particular focus on Croatia and Slovenia. When estimating the efficiency frontier we focus on measures of quantities...

France has seen a marked deterioration in its export performance in the last 10 years or so. Previous empirical research pointed out that weak export performance was due to i) vigorous domestic demand; ii) lower mark-ups due to head-to-head competition with Germany; iii) low non-price...

Twenty years after the launch of market reforms, productive entrepreneurship and vibrant small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ethiopia remain limited, the recent growth acceleration notwithstanding. This paper develops a model of entrepreneurial start ups in an economy with frictions in...

This paper develops the first systematic attempt to model and empirically estimate the concept of optimal resource renting. Optimal rent is found to be positively affected by increases in the recession buffer and resource endowment, and negatively affected by the opportunity cost of hoarding....

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer’s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on...

Inter-firm information exchange with respect to the reliability of trade partners may be unmediated in the sense that it involves direct communication between the personnel of two firms. Alternatively, this information flow may be channeled by or through an organization such as a trade...

Recent Eurobarometer survey data are used to document and explain the stock of social capital in 28 European countries. Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe – measured by civic participation and access to social networks – lags behind that in Western European countries. Using...

What role do community norms play in the diffusion and persistence of new organizational practices? We explore this question through an examination of the widespread practice of wage arrears, the late and nonpayment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Existing research on wage arrears most...