Chinese banks suffer from serious financial fragility manifested by high proportions of non-performing loans and low capital-adequacy ratios. A key policy introduced recently by the Chinese government to reduce financial risks is the establishment of four asset management companies (AMCs) for...

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...

Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations.Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...