We investigate the claim made by proponents of the big-bang strategy that the establishment of property rights in an economy in transition creates its own demand for the enforcement of laws to protect those rights. Our model contains a government engaging in activities to accomplish objectives...

We derive the exact conditions for choosing between the big-bang strategy and a gradualist package following the model of Dewatripont and Roland (1995, Amer. Econ. Rev. 85, 5:1207-1223). We consider gradualism as an option of early bailout and derive its option price. We show how the option...

Frequent government changes, often bringing reversals in ideological orientations, forced agents in economies in transition to make economic decisions without knowing whether their next government would be more or less benevolent, democratic, corrupt, or able and willing to pursue economic...

We present a model of agents facing the uncertainty of two future forms of government who are able to insure against this uncertainty by hiding funds from taxation. In order to choose whether or not to hide funds from taxation, agents need to know policy choices that each government would make...

Two stylized facts are often used to characterize the economies in transition: an increase in the crime level and frequent government changes, where the party in power is replaced by another party with a different, and often opposite, ideological orientation. We investigate the impact on agents'...

We explore an overlooked aspect of the design of the Czech voucher privatization programme, namely, the consequences of allowing individuals to distribute their vouchers among the voucher privatization funds (VPFs). We develop and analyse a model of voucher privatization in which we study the...

We model activism as it affects the future distribution of prices in a portfolio context with risk-averse expected utility of end-of-period wealth maximizing investors. We characterize activism as affecting the mean, the variance, and/or the covariance of the target firm’s price with the...

We consider a continuum of agents in a transition country where the transfer of property rights has occurred. The transition is in progress and the nature of the government's future policies is unknown to the agents. Agents believe that the present government can evolve into one of two types: a...