This paper provides the first systematic evidence on compensation for executives of firms listed in China’s emerging stock market (currently the eighth largest of the world with market capitalization of over $550 billion). Specifically, using comprehensive financial and accounting data on...

This paper makes some selective comparisons of the empirical evidence relating to financial discipline and soft budget constraints in the enterprise sector in China and the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (CEEFSU). The paper finds that: (1) in both...

The article presents a simple agency model of the relationship between corporate valuation and insider trading laws. The article then investigates the model’s three testable hypotheses using firm-level data from a cross-section of developed countries. I find that more stringent insider trading...

We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of Governments' decisions to sell privatised companies on both international and domestic markets in a sample of 392 privatisations in 42 countries. Political theories of privatisation find strong support in our analyses: market oriented Governments...

Our analysis of a rich representative household survey for Malawi, where patrilineal and matrilineal institutions coexist, suggests that (a) in matrilineal societies the likelihood of cash crop cultivation by a household increases with the extent of land owned (or de facto controlled) by males,...

There is no gender difference between success in establishing a business once both males and females have the same preference to self-employment and attempts towards establishing a new business. However, the gender gap tends to be huge when it comes to individual preferences and attempts to...

An alleged achievement of socialism was gender equality in the labour market. Has its collapse shattered this accomplishment? The theoretical literature and attendant empirical evidence are inconclusive. Using data for 2.9 million wage earners in Hungary we find that the male-female difference...

This short paper investigates the path through the 1990s of the gender pay gap in a number of former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The main findings are that the gender pay gap has not exhibited, in general, an upward tendency over the transitional period to which...

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in...