Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

In societies with a political culture of rent-seeking, social norms do not disallow the use of political office for privileged distribution. Societies with such norms tend to be characterized by political insiders and outsiders. We describe the attendant contestability of rents in the two...

We study Pareto improvements whose implementation requires knowledge of only market prices and traded quantities, not utility and demand functions. Quantity stabilization gives agents the right to repeat the net trades they previously conducted, but requires policymakers to have records of those...

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and by arguing that the period of communist rule can be viewed as an...

This study is the theoretical chapter of a planned book. This book, aims to contribute to the theoretical foundations of similarities and differences in the transformation of party-state systems. Analytical framework of system transformation is based on the extension of the Interactive Party...

We analyze the dynamics of Chinese comparative advantage as measured by export shares and the Balassa index using 3-digit and 4-digit sectors for the period 1970 – 1997. We use novel tools to identify periods of rapid structural change and the persistence of comparative advantage, such as...

Why some party-states collapse and others don't? Why some transformations are accompanied by economic crisis while others by economic growth? Are first political or economic transformation strategic alternatives? This paper comprises the essence of the author's comparative research on...

This paper examines how the introduction of deposit insurance influences the relationship between bank capital and liquidity creation. As discussed by Berger and Bouwman (2009), there are two competing hypotheses on this relationship which can be influenced by the presence of deposit insurance....

This article explores the post-communist worlds of welfare capitalism in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, including the successor states of the former Soviet Union. It discusses recent developments, whilst offering some additional theoretical reflections on the key factors that have...