We study the effect of state ownership on the market-to-book ratios of publicly traded European utilities observed from 1994 to 2005. We find that when the company is subject to independent regulation, state ownership is positively associated with firm value. This effect is strong and...

We study the effect of state ownership on the market-to-book ratios of publicly traded European utilities from 1994 to 2005. We find that when the company is subject to independent regulation, state ownership seems positively associated with firm value. This relation tends to appear in countries...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization programs. Using a comprehensive dataset that includes all firms inherited from...

This paper examines the investment and financial decisions of a sample of 92 EU regulated utilities, taking into account key institutional features of EU public utilities, such as: a) regulation by agencies with various degrees of independence; b) partial ownership of the state in the regulated...

This paper provides an assessment of the contribution to privatization in Romania of the 1995-96 Mass Privatization Program (MPP), which offered shares in nearly 5000 companies to citizens in exchange for coupons. Analyzing a comprehensive database of MPP companies, we find that an average of...

This paper estimates the effect of privatization on multifactor productivity using comprehensive panel data on initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. We exploit the data's longitudinal dimension to control for preprivatization selection and estimate long-run impacts. The...

Why do the reported effects of privatization on firm performance vary so much? This paper re-estimates these effects and tests potential explanations for heterogeneity using comprehensive, long-panel data for 70,000 firms in five East European economies. Estimated average effects are positive,...

We estimate the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Applied to longitudinal data on manufacturing firms, our fixed effect and random trend models consistently fail to support workers' fears of job losses from privatization, and they never...

This paper estimates the effect of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. We exploit the key longitudinal feature of our data to measure and control for pre-privatization...