Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on firm-level evidence of microeconomic factors affecting bribes paid in a single...

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...

We study a long-term relationship between a risk-neutral firm that has been delegated to manage a local utility project and a regulator that has always the option-to-revoke the delegation. We show that when the threat of revocation is credible and the cost of exercising it is not too high, the...

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the services provided by the utilities after two decades of reforms? We focus on electricity, gas, water, telephone in the EU 15 Member States. The variables we analyse are consumers' satisfaction...

Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

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...

The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) was the largest experiment in public divestitures among capitalist economies. It had a deep impact on economic policy-making world wide, and was vastly...