Weaknesses in the corporate sector have increasingly been cited as important factors in financial crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries. Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance and risky financing patterns as major causes of the East Asian financial crisis. And...

The authors present new data on the regulation of the entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number if procedures, official time, and official costs that a start-up firm must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...

In recent years, comparative economics experienced a revival, with a new focus on comparing capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. The authors argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to...

The authors study the effects of trade barriers and the persistence of past linkages on trade flows in the former Soviet Union. Estimating a gravity equation on trade among and between nine Russian regions and 14 former Soviet republics, they find that Russian regions traded 60 percent more with...

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are considering liberalizing, privatizing, and deregulating markets face difficult policy issues. Gradual, piecemeal reform efforts have had limited success. The option of a Euro-Mediterranean Agreement (EMA) offers a new opportunity to...

East Asia's financial crisis has been attributed in part to the weak performance and risky financial structures of Asian corporations. In the period before Asia's financial crisis, however, analysts were not suggesting that the financial structure of many East Asian corporations would be unable...

Firm-level data for the Czech Republic (1992-96) suggest that foreign investments had a positive impact on recipient firms'total factor productivity (TFP) growth. This result is robust to corrections for the sample-selection bias that prevails because foreign investment tends to go to firms with...

The Czech Republic's mass-privatization scheme changed the governance of many firms in a short time. The authors show that mass privatization was effective in improving firm management because of the concentrated ownership structure that resulted. For a cross section of 706 firms for the period...

Although the impact of international trade is usually analyzed at the macroeconomic level or at the industry level, the authors here explicitly restrict their analysis to the microeconomic level, the level of the firm. Specifically, they investigate the relative importance of integration with...

The authors investigate the activities of the Bulgarian competition office, the Commission for the Protection of Competition, for the years 1991-95. They provide descriptive statistics on the industry incidence of investigations, the types of behavior investigated, and the frequency with which...