While privatization of state-owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system, no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously. This raises the issue of whether governments strategically privatize...

Strategic restructuring of firms through investment is key to a transition from plan to market. Using data on industrial firms in the Czech Republic during 1992-98, we find that (a) foreign owned companies invest the most and cooperatives the least, (b) private firms do not invest more than...

Using large firm-level data sets from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, we show that the wage behavior of firms changed considerably as these economies launched their transitions to a market system. We find evidence of worker sharing in their enterprise rents and losses at the...

The recent initiative of the European Union Lisbon Agenda to increase levels of R&D investment is addressed by studying the determinants of R&D investment in one of the recent EU entrants, Slovenia. Previous empirical literature-mainly cross-sectional in nature-has tested the demand-pull...

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign-owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all...

In this paper, the authors evaluate empirically the relative importance of two explanat ions of Yugoslav interindustry income differentials. One explanation, proposed initially by J. Vanek and M. Jovicic (1975), stresses capit al market imperfections which permit capital rents to be appropriated...

We estimate returns to human capital during communism and the transition using data on 2,284 men in the Czech Republic. We show: (a) extremely low and constant rates of return to education under the communist wage grid and dramatic increases in transition, which do not differ by firm ownership,...