This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal...

Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain - which for decades had separated East from West - most countries of Central and Eastern Europe are now members of the European Union; some have even adopted the euro. Nonetheless, these countries have also remained exceptionally vulnerable to...

In the economic literature the reasons for recession during the transformation of a planned into a market economy are still debated. The following article sets the arguments in this debate against an interpretation of the stylised facts of the transformation process in Central Eastern Europe...