The authors use survey data on a sample of over 10,000 firms from 80 countries to assess (1) how successful a priori classifications are in distinguishing between financially constrained and unconstrained firms, and (2) more generally, the determinants of financing obstacles of firms. They find...

The restructuring of large enterprises has received much attention in the transition of centrally planned economies to market economies. The need to transform these enterprises into viable firms is widely acknowledged. The extent of such restructuring and the determinants that underlie a...

How should countries in transition to market economies handle the losses of large loss-making enterprises? Over the past six years several governments in transition economies have implemented isolation programs that combine features of reorganization under bankruptcy (as in industrial countries)...

In this paper the authors provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. They rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise...

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of micro-level field research conducted in late 1989 and early 1990 of constraints confronting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lanka and Tanzania, and to analyze the implications of these results for reforms to promote the development...

Employment in developing countries is disproportionately concentrated in very small firms. The authors examine the extent to which the distribution of firm size is related to the quality of the legal system using data from Mexico. They combine Lucas'(1978) model of firm size with Himmelberg,...

Using a large sample of data on mid-sized firms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, the authors compare the performance of privatized and state firms in the environment of the postcommunist transition. They find strong evidence that private ownership--except for worker ownership--...

Using enterprise survey data for 1995-97, the author studies and compares how different modes of privatizing to insiders affect enterprise restructuring in two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Moldova. Restructuring in companies in which incumbent managers received significant ownership...

The authors explore the relationship between the relative size of the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, economic growth, and poverty using a new database on the share of SME labor in the total manufacturing labor force. Using a sample of 76 countries, they find a strong association...

The author examines the effect of product and geographic diversification on firm value for a sample of 1,914 corporations in 18 countries. His results indicate that both product and geographic diversification destroy value at high levels of diversification, suggesting that agency and influence...