Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries is approaching that of firms in advanced economies. We examine the extent of this convergence in the Czech Republic and Russia, economies that represent alternative models of implementing development policies,...

While privatization of state-owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system, no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously. This raises the issue of whether governments strategically privatize...

Strategic restructuring of firms through investment is key to a transition from plan to market. Using data on industrial firms in the Czech Republic during 1992-98, we find that (a) foreign owned companies invest the most and cooperatives the least, (b) private firms do not invest more than...

Using large firm-level data sets from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, we show that the wage behavior of firms changed considerably as these economies launched their transitions to a market system. We find evidence of worker sharing in their enterprise rents and losses at the...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of employment and wage behavior of firms in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Russia during the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The four main findings are: 1) There is evidence of some (not excessive) labor hoarding before the transition...

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all...