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...

We examine financial constraints and forms of finance used for investment, by analysing survey data on 157 large privatised companies in Hungary and Poland for the period 1998 – 2000. The Bayesian analysis using Gibbs sampling is carried out to obtain inferences about the sample companies’...

We analyze the effects of ownership type and concentration on performance of a population of firms in a model large-scale privatization economy (Czech Republic). Using specifications based on first-differences and unique instrumental variables, we find that few types of private ownership improve...

Using confidential microdata from the US Census, we find that the fraction of manufacturing plants that export rose from 21% in 1987 to 39% in 2006. It has been suggested that similar trends in other countries may have been caused by declining costs of entering foreign markets. Our study tests...

Using data on 157 large companies in Poland and Hungary this paper employs a Bayesian structural equation modeling to examine interrelationships between corporate governance, managers’ independence from owners in terms of strategic decision-making, exporting and performance. It is found that...

We study whether Russian Financial-Industrial Groups facilitate access by Russian firms to investment finance. We compare firms which are members of official Financial Industrial Groups and/or are owned by a large Russian bank with a control set of large firms categorized by dispersed ownership...

In this paper we use a survey of 281 Czech, Hungarian and Polish newly established small private firms in order to shed some light on the constrains these firms face in the credit market. The results of our survey show that imperfections in capital markets in Central European economies do not...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China’s reform between 1988 and 2002. We pay special attention to the changing role of sorting by ability versus budget-constraint effects as China’s education policy...

Using firm-level data from Bulgaria and Romania, this paper addresses a lacuna in the transition literature, namely, the link of firm-level employment turnover with firm-level growth in labour productivity. The results suggest that while net job creation at the firm level was affected by...