During the transition from plan to market, managers and politicians succeeded in maintaining control of large parts of the stock of socialist physical capital. Despite the obvious importance of this phenomenon, there have been no efforts to model, measure and investigate this process...

We provide the first test of the Hoff and Stiglitz (2004) model predicting whether and under what conditions mass privatizations are accompanied by asset stripping. In addition to directly testing the theory, we also tackle an important policy-oriented issue of why a large number of efficient...

This paper exploits the rapid rise in self-employment rates in post-communist Eastern Europe as a valuable "quasi-experiment" for understanding the sources of entrepreneurship. A relative demand-supply model and an individual sectoral choice model are used to analyze a 1993 survey of 27,000...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms - privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...