This paper examines the progress of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform in the People's Republic of China. After defining SOEs and considering their scope of operation within the PRC economy, the focus of the paper is on the major reform waves that followed the deterioration of SOE profitability...

We trace the rise of the so called oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia and examine their relationship to income distribution in Russia. When Russia moved to a market economy in the 1990s a new business elite evolved. Russia's distinctive path towards market economy, among other factors, gave rise to...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results...

Trade reforms in transition economies are analyzed in a model of trade and vertical product differentiation. We first show that trade liberalization in transition economies reduces the local firm s output and raises the prices of all variants. Second, we find that neither free trade nor the...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

Diversified firms often trade at a discount with respect to their focused counterparts. The literature has tried to explain the apparent misallocation of resources with lobbying activities or power struggles. We show that diversification can destroy value even when resources are efficiently...

The new information and communication technology, ICT, induces households to take over tasks from firms and government agencies, using tools and systems provided by these very same organizations. The result is often joint production activities. We argue that the importance of ICT for the...

This paper experimentally investigates how monetary incentives and emotions influence behaviour in a two-player power-to-take game. In this game, one player can claim any part of the other's endowment (take rate), and the second player can respond by destroying his or her own endowment. We focus...

We provide evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. Combining temporal variation in international drug prices with spatial variation in the suitability to produce opium, we show that higher drug prices reduce conflict over the 2002-2014 period in...