One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. It is widely believed that competition has a positive effect on efficiency, but the theoretical and empirical support is quite scarce. The objective of this paper...

All economies are heterogeneous. The behavior of the economic agents with different in important aspects. However, in a stable environment usually strong forces shape a typical behavior, thus many agents act similarly. On the one hand, the behavior of agents will be much less uniform in an...

All economies are heterogeneous. The behavior of the economic agents with different in important aspects. However, in a stable environment usually strong forces shape a typical behavior, thus many agents act similarly. On the one hand, the behavior of agents will be much less uniform in an...

One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. This paper attempts to analyze the relationship of market structure, market imperfections and corporate performance by mark-up pricing. There is clear evidence...

This paper estimates the relationship between innovation and firm performance by using Community Innovation Survey data for Hungary. It exploits the possibility of linking the innovation data to ownership and disaggregated trade data. Innovative firms are more productive, more likely to trade...

In this paper we analyse the relationship between gravity variables and f.o.b. export unit values using Hungarian firm-product-destination data. By taking firm-product level selection into account we show that export unit values increase with distance even for particular firm-product...

Under perfect competition and constant returns to scale, firms producing homogeneous products set their prices at their marginal costs which also equal their average costs. However, the departure from these standard assumptions has important implications with respects to the derived theoretical...

This paper investigates the link between competition and efficiency for the Hungarian corporate sector during various phases of the transition process. We employ frontier production functions to explore differences among groups of firms, and to identify the typical adjustment process of each...

This paper discusses the relevance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for the transition economies since 1990. Their experience is consistent with this hypothesis and the further implications of this are discussed especially in regard to EMU targets for exchange rate stability and inflation.

What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase...