This paper provides evidence on abnormal returns of Portuguese privatization public offerings for the period from 1989 to 2001. Previous empirical studies report the existence of underpricing for privatized firms in the short-run and positive abnormal returns in the long run. This study explores...

Sub-Saharan African states urgently need expanded and more dynamic private sectors, more efficient and effective infrastructure/utility provision, and increased investment from both domestic and foreign sources. Privatization is one way to address these problems. But African states have...

Many African state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly those in infrastructure, have a long history of poor performance. From the outset, SOE financial and economic performance generally failed to meet the expectations of their creators and funders. By the late 1970s, the situation was...

We survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy. The first ones extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization...

We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain...

This report provides an overview of the causes and consequences of the Italian State-owned Enterprises (SOE) reform process. Particularly, it analyzes the symbiotic link between share issue privatization (SIP), i.e. privatization in public equity markets, and financial market development, and...

It is believed that privatizations substantially contributed to boost stock markets through the 1980s and 1990s. However, trough which channels did that materialize? We test whether privatizations -improving households' acquaintance with the risk and return characteristics of stocks through the...

This paper examines the restructuring of state assets in markets deregulated by privatizations and investment liberalizations. We show that the government has a stronger incentive to restructure than the buyer: A firm restructuring only takes into account how much its own profit will increase....

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...