This paper considers whether political business cycles exist in Eastern European accession countries.Section I introduces the overall objectives of the work. Section II provides a short introductionto the political business cycle literature. It also considers the role of exchange rates,...

Growth empirics with institutional measures is performed for 25 transition countries overthe period 1990-95. Estimation results suggest that (particularly state) institutions aresignificant for growth and, especially, foreign direct investment (FDI), the latter in turnbeing important for the...

Institutions are strikingly absent from most economic theory, certainly from growth theory.In standard theory it is simply assumed that the needed institutional environment is there,within which economic agents can make their optimizing decisions. At the same time, indescriptive growth studies,...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

Total Factor Productivity (TFP)is often used on the macro-economic level as an indicator of changes in efficiency of a country. In many transition economies TFP is seen to have been negative the last decade of the plan economy and starts increasing and become positive after a (quite a) few years...

We build a simple theoretical model to understand why developing and transition economieshave increasingly applied anti-dumping laws. To that end, we investigate the strategic incentivesof oligopolistic exporting firms to undertake dumping in these economies. We show that dumpingmay be due to...