Thinking about Ronald Coase, economists generally refer to transaction and social costs, to the importance of property rights and institutions or to the Coase-theorem. Examine his work more closely, a common feature takes shape behind these ideas, the public utilities. The constant and detailed...

Energy industries are mainly organised at national level in Hungary, however local governments have their specific role in the system. Local governments have been major performers in the first period of the transition process: they were entitled to receive 25 per cent of the shares in electric...

Several decades of market opening has become a characteristic of network industries. Its main hindrances and aids has come into sight during this period. There is a need now to evaluate the process of market opening and to assess the steps to be taken. Market opening is usually measured by...

International organizations promote privatization as precondition for economic development. But is there really too little privatization? This political economy model asks for the incentives of governments to privatize or restructure a state-owned firm. Different government types are compared to...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization programs. Using a comprehensive dataset that includes all firms inherited from...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

With the help of a peculiar institutional feature of early Romanian privatization, when a group of firms was explicitly banned to become private, we test which factors contributed to the selection of firms into long-term state ownership. We find that politicians sheltered large and inefficient...

We use a unique cross-section survey of manufacturing firms from four European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) linked with balance sheet data to study the relationship between key aspects of globalization and firm-level markups. The main results are: (i) Exporting is positively...

We provide a new explanation why effective tax rates are smaller for larger firms even in the absence of common channels like profit shifting and lobbying. This result emerges in a heterogeneous firms model with endogenous mark-ups. Our framework features imperfect tax pass-through into prices...