Transparency-sunshine-is often touted as a core element of the governance agenda, and one that is most important in environments with low transparency to begin with. In a provocative paper published in the American Political Science Review, Edmund Malesky, Paul Schuler, and Anh Tran present the...

To ascertain the degree to which enterprises have soft budgets and to find the causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One-quarter of the enterprises face soft budgets, a large proportion of...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

There is no room for complacency, however. Corruption is not falling in all countries or all sectors, and even the most successful reformers still tend to have higher levels of firm-level corruption than in Western Europe. The burden weighs most heavily on the new private firms that are the...