The choice of capital structure by firms is a fundamental issue in financial literature. According to a recent finding, the capital structure of firms remains almost unchanged during their lives meaning that leverage ratios are significantly stable over time. The stability of leverage ratios is...

Post-communist Europe provides a rich context to examine the role of governmental policies in entrepreneurial activity. While transitional economies shared similar experiences during their journey to a market economy, one is able to see differences in their approaches. This qualitative study...

The analysis and created statistical models of energy consumption tendencies in the European Union (EU25), including new countries in transition, are presented. The EU15 market economy countries and countries in transition are classified into six clusters by relative indicators of Gross Domestic...

The subject of our consideration are the experiences relating to pension fund regulations from the point of view of their safety of operations in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe. These countries represent two groups. The first includes Hungary and Poland, where the decision to...

During the last four years, the eight Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 have made significant strides toward financial integration with the EU. Several pieces of evidence support this finding. First, yields on long-term sovereign bonds in accession countries have converged...

In this paper, I examine the effectiveness of improvements in political and civil rights for attracting foreign direct investment flows (FDI) into democracies. I contend that advances in the quality of democracy – specifically those concerning civil rights – present positive but decreasing...

This group of essays examines the ongoing economic struggles experienced by former Soviet-bloc countries as they attempt to establish market-based economies.

The working paper analyzes the possible distributional consequences of the global crisis based on the lessons of past crises. The decline in the labor share across the globe has been a major factor that led to the current global crisis. Onaran argues that this is a crisis of distribution, and...

This paper argues that traditional explanations of the fiscal crisis in transition economies overlook the crucial interconnection between the reduction in subsidies expenditure and the decrease in profit tax revenues. It thus contends that the impact on the fiscal budget of the crisis of...

During the past five years, there has been an important international debate over the style of market reforms in the former centrally planned economies of East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The economic performance across regions, summarized in Table 1, could not be more...