Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies. Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed....

Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders a pool of candidates for top political office and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

Do citizens have a role in constraining the policies of autocratic governments? Usually political and economic literature models autocracy as if citizens have no role in constraining a leader's behavior, when in fact autocratic governments are afraid of potential citizen revolts. In this paper...

This paper develops a new argument for the Chinese Communist Party´s success in implementing the post-Mao economic reform. We build a three-player political agency model, showing that the credibility of the threats of deposition by the selectorate and of revolts by citizens are both crucial...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and - surprisingly - that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

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...

This study analyzes the evolution of competitive conditions in the Banking industries of fourteen Central and Eastern European (CEE) transition economies using firm-level data for the period 1993-2000. The results of the competition analysis suggest that the banking markets of CEE countries...

This paper presents findings from a content analysis of all 460 Dear Lawyer Bao (DLB) legal advice columns ever published in its ten-year history (1989-98) in the Beijing Evening News. While much sociolegal research has focused on the exercise of power in the legal process through the control of...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...