The authors investigate the activities of the Bulgarian competition office, the Commission for the Protection of Competition, for the years 1991-95. They provide descriptive statistics on the industry incidence of investigations, the types of behavior investigated, and the frequency with which...

This paper uses nationally representative survey data from Mexico to compare households with savings accounts in formal financial institutions to their neighbors who do not have such accounts. The survey,which was conducted in 2005, contains information on nearly 5,000 households. The findings...

Weaknesses in the corporate sector have increasingly been cited as important factors in financial crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries. Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance and risky financing patterns as major causes of the East Asian financial crisis. And...

East Asia's financial crisis has been attributed in part to the weak performance and risky financial structures of Asian corporations. In the period before Asia's financial crisis, however, analysts were not suggesting that the financial structure of many East Asian corporations would be unable...

The author investigates the relationship between ownership structure and enterprise restructuring in six newly independent states: Georgia, Kazakstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. He documents the changing pattern of ownership in 960 privatized manufacturing companies from...

The Czech Republic's mass-privatization scheme changed the governance of many firms in a short time. The authors show that mass privatization was effective in improving firm management because of the concentrated ownership structure that resulted. For a cross section of 706 firms for the period...

Although the impact of international trade is usually analyzed at the macroeconomic level or at the industry level, the authors here explicitly restrict their analysis to the microeconomic level, the level of the firm. Specifically, they investigate the relative importance of integration with...

In recent years, comparative economics experienced a revival, with a new focus on comparing capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. The authors argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to...

The authors assess Thailand's policy options for reducing large corporations'vulnerability to economic shocks and improving their corporate governance - and for providing smaller firms a more stable funding structure. Using data for firms listed on Thailand's stock exchange, they empirically...

The authors test several propositions derived by Shleifer and Vishny (1994, 1996) about how privatization and stabilization (hard budget constraints) affect enterprise behavior. They document the changes in financing, employment, and operating efficiency that have occurred in more than 6300...