During transition, maintaining employment and providing a social safety net to the unemployed are important to social stability, which in turn is crucial for the productivity of the whole economy. Because independent institutions for social safety are lacking and firms with strong profit...

In the hierarchy of China's state sector, both before and during the current reform period, government bureaucrats select and supervise state-owned enterprise (SOE) managers. The incentive problem of SOE managers has been studied carefully, but that of the bureaucrats has not. This paper uses a...

Why has the rapid privatization of firms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union not brought dramatically higher performance as expected? If private ownership were so clearly dominant, why has state control of enterprises been such a common phenomenon historically, even in many Western...