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...

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.The...

Exploiting the unique economic situation after German unification, I investigate how exit decisions deviate between new firms in a transition and a comparatively stable market environment. Two competing exit mechanisms are considered: entrepreneurial self-selection via voluntary liquidation and...

The quality of institutions is considerable worse in Central Asia than in other transition countries. Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2005, this paper shows that oil and aid exert a negative influence on institutional development. At the same time,...

This paper investigates the potential for a further increase in trade between the fifteen old EU members and the twelve new countries having joined in 2004 and 2007 that results from a convergence of the new members' institutions towards the level of the EU-15 in accordance with the Acquis...

In a first step, more generally, the concept of institutional arbitrage within the comparative capitalism literature is put to a test: as a result of comparative institutional advantages due to different investment incentives provided by types of institutions, companies relocate activities to...

Eine präzise Darstellung des seit 1989 andauernden Übergangs von der Plan- zur Marktwirtschaft (sowie von der kommunistischen Diktatur zu Demokratien westlicher Prägung) in Mittel- und Osteuropa würde den Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit sprengen, die nicht den eigentlichen...

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the North Caucasus is known as a politically unstable region and as a melting pot for terrorism and all kinds of criminal activity, reaching from drugtrafficking and illegal arms trade to hijacking and extortion. Furthermore, the North Caucasus is one of...

The paper emphasizes the transition in Russia and the role institutions played before and during the process. In Russia, a big bang approach was applied. That is to say, transition was conducted all of a sudden, omitting important underlying reforms. This practice should function as a shock...

We exploit Germany’s reunification to identify how school-age education affects entrepreneurial intentions. We look at university students in reunified Germany who were born before the Iron Curtain fell. During school age, all students in the West German control group received formal and...