Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes.I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats.I present...

Simulations indicated that, in the class of 2 x 2 games which only have a mixed equilibrium, payoffs are increased by risk aversion compared to risk neutrality. In this paper I show that the total expected payoff to a player over this class in equilibrium is indeed higher if this player is risk...

This research contributes to the investigation of the emerging stock markets in transition economies, namely in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the various determinants of shares delisting e.g. exclusion from public trading on the Prague Stock Exchange (PSE) during the period 1993...

An elimination tournament matches players pairwise and promotes the winners to a subsequent round where the procedure is repeated. In the presence of idiosyncratic noise the tournament turns into a probabilistic mechanism that reveals the ranking of players imperfectly. I assess theoretically...

Gneezy, List and Wu [Q. J. Econ. 121 (2006) 1283-1309] document that lotteries are often valued less than the lotteries’ worst outcomes. We show how to undo this result.

This paper employs firm-level panel data from the Czech Republic to investigate the empirical relevance of the learning-by-exporting hypothesis. To provide convincing estimates, one must be able to disentangle learning-by-exporting from changes in company management that induce the company to...

We contribute to the literature on the political risk of social security by extending Feldstein and Ranguelova's (2001) methodology for measuring risk in a funded pension system to a pay-as-you-go system. We use the methodology to assess the risk over indexation of benefits in the Czech Republic...

There is no consensus in the literature as to which model should be used to estimate the stock returns and the cost of capital in the emerging markets. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) that is most often used for this purpose in the developed markets has a poor empirical record and is...

Theory and empirics suggest that by curbing competition, incumbent electricity companies which used to be and here are referred to as Vertically Integrated Utilities (VIUs), can increase their profitability through combined ownership of generation and transmission and/or distribution networks....

The important characteristic of international competition between developed and less developed countries is vertical product differentiation, where firms' quality choices represent strategic decisions. Unlike the previous literature, we allow for a leadership in quality choice and the...