As many East Asian countries plunged into economic decline, the structure of concentrated ownership and associated corporate governance, along with weak corporate performance, have been blamed for the crisis. There is little empirical evidence, however, of the nature of ownership structures in...

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...

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...

The restructuring of large enterprises has received much attention in the transition of centrally planned economies to market economies. The need to transform these enterprises into viable firms is widely acknowledged. The extent of such restructuring and the determinants that underlie a...

How should countries in transition to market economies handle the losses of large loss-making enterprises? Over the past six years several governments in transition economies have implemented isolation programs that combine features of reorganization under bankruptcy (as in industrial countries)...

Intra-industry trade as a share of total tradebetween Central and Eastern European nations and the European Union (EU) is among the highest of all the EU's bilateral trade flows. The authors break down data on these trade flows into horizontal and vertical components, and investigate the...

The authors use a sample of 133 countries to investigate the link between the abundance of natural resources and micro-economic reforms. Previous studies suggest that natural resource abundance gives rise to governments that are less accountable to the public and states that are oligarchic, and...

The authors determine how time delays affect international trade using newly collected World Bank data on the days it takes to move standard cargo from the factory gate to the ship in 126 countries. They estimate a modified gravity equation, controlling for endogeneity and remoteness. On...

The authors study the effects of trade barriers and the persistence of past linkages on trade flows in the former Soviet Union. Estimating a gravity equation on trade among and between nine Russian regions and 14 former Soviet republics, they find that Russian regions traded 60 percent more with...