The picture of the securities exchanges and financial sectors in CEE countries is still relatively unfavorable. The CEE securities exchanges – with the only exception of the Warsaw Stock Exchange – are, in comparison with their western counterparts, underdeveloped and less important for the...

Firms in the new EU member states of Eastern Europe are more productive than those in other transition economies, but with a diminishing advantage. The least productive firms benefit the most from membership, although the situation is reversed in the case of foreign-owned firms. Foreign direct...

An important factor influencing corporate finance and economic growth in China lies in its government sponsored industrial policies. Examining China's five-year plans during 1991-2010, we find that state-owned firms in government supported industries enjoy faster growth in initial public...

We provide novel evidence on the effectiveness of mandated changes in Russian transparency and disclosure (henceforth T&D) rules in boosting shareholder welfare. We focus on the staggered implementation of these T&D reforms initiated in 2002 and implemented during 2003-07. Using difference in...

A conceptual framework for analyzing the credit rationing and the link between credit access and profitability is developed. The empirical analysis using data from manufacturing firms in Bulgaria, provides direct estimates of credit rationing and its impact on profitability in transition...

This paper examines whether the introduction of corporate governance (CG) reforms in general and that of transparency and disclosure (T&D) rules in particular can necessarily boost firm performance. Existing literature suggests that CG reforms can boost performance because it can resolve the...

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation.A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic...

Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat? is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that statutory...

Many of the EU accession countries have announced that they will not only try to enter the EU as quickly as possible but also to adopt the euro at an early date. This is justified by the effort to avoid the danger of financial instability in the period prior to euro-introduction. However, by...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...