We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...

This paper first examines various definitions of Kornai's soft budget constraint (SBC) and the difficulties involved in interpreting data on losses, subsidies and financing, and then considers selective evidence from transition economies. Stocks of overdue trade credit are no larger than in...

This article uses data on 27,000 firms from 50 countries, half of which are transition economies, together with the specific case of Serbia to examine the relationship between productivity, the investment climate and private ownership of firms. As government capacity to address the investment...

Wide differences between effective or realised average tax rates and tax yields that would result if statutory tax rates were strictly applied indicate tax compliance and collection problems. Due to the greater politicisation of tax systems in transition economies (TEs), we would expect the...

Using a firm level dataset from four regions of Russia covering 1996/97, an investigation was carried out into how the surplus created within the firm is divided between profits and wages. An efficient bargaining framework based on the work of Svejnar (1986) is employed which takes into account...

We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...

This paper provides new evidence on progress in transition and the 'readiness' of enterprises for accession to the EU using a detailed survey administered to approximately 200 manufacturing firms in each of Poland, Romania and Spain. A major innovation is the use of a market economy and member...

We discuss instrumental variables (IV) estimation in the broader context of the generalized method of moments (GMM), and describe an extended IV estimation routine that provides GMM estimates as well as additional diagnostic tests. Stand-alone test procedures for heteroskedasticity,...

Using data from a large enterprise-level panel designed to address this issue, we account for enterprise performance in Russia. We link performance to four aspects of the economic environment: enterprise ownership; corporate governance; market structures and competition; and financial constraints....

A magyar bankrendszerben a kilencvenes évek elején ugrásszerűen megnőtt a rossz hitelek állománya. A szerzők empirikus adatokra támaszkodva amellett érvelnek, hogy ez nem a flowprobléma kiéleződésének, vagyis a rossz hitelezési gyakorlat folytatásának volt a következménye....