This paper reports the findings of a survey of more than 3,000 firms in 20 transition countries. It shows that barter and other non-monetary transactions (including the use of bills of exchange, debt swaps, barter chains, and the redemption of debt in goods) are an important phenomenon in Russia...

This paper examines the importance of competition in the growth and development of firms. We make use of the large-scale natural experiment of the shift from an economic system without competition to a market economy to shed light on the factors that influence innovation by firms and their...

One of the main aims of the deregulation of previously heavily regulated markets is to diminish artificial barriers to entry. But in oligopolistic markets, the mechanisms whereby potential competition can discipline the behaviour of incumbent firms are not very well understood, especially since...

This paper explores implications of the fact that individuals know more than the authorities about their risk of infection and can take migration decisions before their health status is publicly observable. In a 2-period model we study under which conditions the presence of quarantine measures...

The conventional academic rationale for supranational intervention to curb state aids to industry appeals to transfrontier spillovers. However, competition policy practitioners often speak in terms of curbing "wasteful" spending, regardless of whether or not any international spillovers are...

This paper examines the performance of 515 banks in 16 transition economies for the years 1994 – 99 based on their public financial accounts. We first examine lending behaviour and probability distribution of bank profitability to determine whether these banks exhibit behaviour and performance...

This paper uses a survey of 3,300 firms in 25 transition countries to shed light on the factors that influence restructuring by firms and their subsequent performance as measured by growth in sales and in sales per employee over a three-year period. We begin by surveying what a decade of...

This paper models two discontinuities that have been claimed to constitute important exceptions to the standard economic theory of human motivation. The first is a discontinuity in the distribution across population types of the willingness to accept payment in return for certain services such...