Mass privatization offers a particularly suitable framework to study the change in ownership concentration as the extent of change is unusual for a stable market economy. Focusing on two different mass privatization schemes in two transition economies, Poland and the Czech Republic, we find that...

In this paper, we show that drought has a positive effect on the incidence of civil war over the 1945-2005 period in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index which is a richer measurement of drought than the measures used in the literature (rainfall and temperature) as it...

We investigate how economic inequality can persist in Latin America in the context of radical falls in political inequality in the last decades. Using data from Colombia, we focus on a critical facet of democratization - the entry of new politicians. We show that initial levels of inequality...

The Central and Eastern European countries significantly reduced their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 1995 and 2003. Was this emission reduction just the fortuitous result of the major economic transformation undergone by countries in the transition? Or is it rather a result of more...

This paper argues that the so-called Arab spring is part of a tectonic shift which signals the frailty of the Arab state system as such. Countries benefitting from oil and gas rents have been more resilient, because of their potential to create systems of incentives and disincentives in order to...

This paper documents recent structural changes in China's corporate landscape, based on company level data, providing a complementary perspective to that of official Chinese statistics. We classify China's largest companies by revenue since 2004 (based on Fortune Global 500 rankings), and...