In this paper we present and test a theory of how political corruption, found in many transition and emerging market economies, affects corporate governance and productive efficiency of firms. Our model predicts that underdeveloped democratic institutions that do not punish political corruption...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

This paper investigates whether and how various characteristics of CEOs and corporate boards are related to the severity of corporate governance problems within firms. The latter is proxied by private benefits of control, which we measure for dual class stock firms using the voting premium...

The paper studies whether and how CEO turnover in Ukrainian firms is related to their performance. Based on a novel dataset covering Ukrainian joint stock companies in 2002-2006, the paper finds statistically significant negative association between the past performance of firms measured by...

This paper studies economic effects of the gender composition of corporate boards, employing a new and unique longitudinal dataset of virtually all Russian companies whose shares were traded on the national stock market between 1998 and 2014. Using multiple identification approaches, alternative...

This paper provides new evidence on the structure, dynamics and performance effects of corporate boards in publicly traded companies in Russia. It takes advantage of a new and unique longitudinal dataset of virtually all Russian companies whose shares were traded in the RTS/MICEX/MOEX over...

This paper studies the effect on company performance of appointing non-executive directors that are also executive directors in other firms. The analysis is based on a new panel dataset of UK companies over 2002-2008. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between the presence of these...

Studies of public-private and foreign-domestic wage differentials face difficultiesdistinguishing ownership effects from correlated characteristics of workers and firms. Thispaper estimates these ownership differentials using linked employer-employee data (LEED)from Hungary containing 1.35mln...

This paper studies a partial-contracting model where an agent may provide effort to increase a project's scope before some later decisions have to be taken. Consistent with existing empirical evidence, we find a positive relationship between exogenous risk and delegation. That is, we show that...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...