Informal payments in the public health care system represent one of the most sensitive topics in the medical world. It is also a subject of interest for many researchers. As evidenced by reports from various European institutions, a catalyst for their use was the COVID-19 pandemic. Among all the...

The paper investigates how efficiency of business environment and corruption (infirmal payments and state capture) affect the microeconomic perfirmance of firms. The novelty of the paper is to look at these effects in the interaction with the firm ownership. We use firm-level micro data...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...