During the late 1990s, China introduced the gaizhi process for privatizing state-owned firms. Under gaizhi, insiders could acquire their firms at a price that was based on recent profitability. This gave the managers of firms an incentive to reduce short run profits. We compared the performance...

The paper describes the privatization process in Bolivia, placing emphasis on the particularities of the capitalization mechanism that was used for this purpose, and the regulatory framework introduced as its essential complement. With this background, the paper then details the changes in the...

The present paper analyzes the top ten Italian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over the period 2004-2013, after both their corporate organization and their markets have been deeply reformed. We question whether SOEs' strategies are more profit or public oriented. The authors find that, on...

Mass privatization offers a particularly suitable framework to study the change in ownership concentration as the extent of change is unusual for a stable market economy. Focusing on two different mass privatization schemes in two transition economies, Poland and the Czech Republic, we find that...

In this work we analyse to what degree the efficiency of a publicly owned non-monopolistic enterprise improves as a result of the introduction of strategic organizational reforms consisting of adopting "private-firm-like" management practices, criteria, and governance structure; i.e....

During the late 1990s, China introduced the gaizhi process for privatizing state-owned firms. Under gaizhi, managers could acquire their firms at a price that was based on recent profitability. Systematic analysis of longitudinal data reveals the following: (1) There is a statistically...

An emerging trend in financial services is banks' increasingly common refusal to do business with industries for political reasons rather than for traditional business justifications. Banks' refusals are often explained by a desire to make a difference or send a message. While this desire may...

This paper is intended to model the process of shifting decision rights and residual claim from the central agent (government) to the inside members of the firm in China and to analyze how the reform has improved performance of the state-owned enterprises. We show that the bargaining solution...

We compare the change in ownership concentration in firms privatized through two different programs of mass privatization: the Czech voucher scheme and the Polish program of National Investment Funds. Despite important differences in ownership structure at the start of the process and in the...

This paper investigates the relationship between government support for R&D and R&D expenditure financed privately by firms using a comprehensive plant level data set for the manufacturing sector in the Republic of Ireland. Our empirical strategy combines a non-parametric matching procedure with...