Soft budget constraints (SBCs) can be said to exist in situations where governments rescue loss-making firms in order to guarantee their survival by means of either a direct or an indirect injection of credit. The credit markets of the former socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe...

The paper argues that the networked firms have an advantage in securing bank finance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions. An analysis of recent BEEPS data from sixteen CEE transition countries lends some support to this hypothesis. Firms affiliated to business associations are...

We employ 19,521 unique firms in 30 transition economies to investigate the relation between the origins of private firms and their financing patterns. In our sample, the private firms are either privatized former state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or ab initio (from the beginning) private firms....