The concept of social entrepreneurship as a characterization of social responsibility forbusiness organizations has gained considerable popularity. There is growing belief ininternational development and donor communities that this form of for‐profit activitymight be the long‐sought panacea...

This paper investigates the impact of specific modes of entry of foreign banks, i.e.greenfield investment versus merger and acquisition, on bank performance in threetransition economies – the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use stochasticfrontier analysis to model and measure the cost...

Does entrepreneurial optimism affect business performance? Using a unique data setbased on repeated survey design, we investigate this relationship empirically. Ourmeasures of ‘optimism’ and ‘realism’ are derived from comparing the turnovergrowth expectations of 133 owners-managers with...

The literature is divided in its opinion about the impact of concentration of ownership on firmperformance. On the one hand, concentration of ownership that, in turn, concentratesmanagement control in the hands of a strategic investor, eliminates agency problemsassociated with dispersed...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliatedfirms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions ofmissing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate thisby setting up a model where firms within the business group are connectedto...

When the first phase of the crisis focused primarily on the interbank market volatility, the second phase spread on the instability of public finance. Although the overall stance of public finances of the new members is better than the old member countries, the differences within the new group...

Some ten years ago, Michael Dooley (Dooley, 1997; Dooley, 2000) put forward an insurance model of currency crises, which after some modifications gives a good theoretical basis for explanation of the overall dynamics of the post communist transformation and diversity across countries and periods....

Bulgaria and Romania are neighbouring countries, which have always been rivals. Following the decision on EU enlargement to include Bulgaria and Romania (late 1999) and with membership negotiations already started (2004), the race between the two countries gained momentum and comparisons of...

After more than two decades of transition and integration, countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) still exhibit income levels that are significantly lower than the European Union (EU) average. This paper examines convergence in per-capita GDP between CEE and the EU over the period...

The question of who benefits and who loses from the transition, the channels and mechanisms of redistribution of wealth in the post-communist period, and the relation between redistribution and monetary regime are, in our opinion, fundamental in understanding theoretically the deep systemic...