' political connectedness and their economic performance in Ukraine. First, it estimates the share of politically connected firms … in Ukraine's economy. Second, the study looks at how different the performance of politically connected firms is from …, and beneficial tax regimes. There is a strong negative correlation between political connection and productivity …

decisions highly contingent on firm characteristics and past performance, complicating the identification of the privatization … 1990s. Relying on the regression discontinuity design, the analysis finds that privatizations led to productivity gains of … specification (including its random-growth variant). The paper further finds that the privatization effects are significantly larger …