Voucher privatization in the Czech Republic presented a natural experiment of the ability of investors to construct their portfolios under conditions of asymmetric information and the absence of stock market prices. This paper provides a theoretical model of an optimal portfolio choice made by...

The link between informed trading and the bid-ask spread has been the focus of abundant literature and some authors feared that a large amount of informed trading might lead to shutdown of markets. We explore this issue using data from the Czech Republic. Our estimates confirm that the share of...

The empirical transition literature on the comparison of restructuring prior to privatization is quite limited. Macedonia is a specific case among transition economies where a large number of break-ups occurred at the beginning of privatization. Using firm-level data, we estimate the effects of...

An original method based on an n-markets simultaneous partial equilibrium model is designed to evaluate the second order bias in the Consumer Price Index's (CPI) approximation of the Cost-of-Living (COL) and to test the statistical significance of its mean value over a variety of horizons. In...

The curse of natural resources detected in numerous cross-country growth regressions isquestioned. Although natural resource dependence is associated with slow economic growth, there is no evidence that natural resource abundance per se is negatively related to growth. Thus, the supposed link...

This paper reviews the pros and cons of an early EU enlargement towards Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs hereafter). Firstly, the Maastricht criteria, which cannot be literally assessed during the catching up process, but that nevertheless mirror the huge efforts undertaken in order...

Monthly data on the inflation expectations of financial analysts in the Czech Republic exhibit a tendency for permanent bias and ineffectiveness which violates the rational expectations hypothesis assumed in macroeconomic models. This paper asks whether the surveyed data include any...

This paper investigates the impact of a large territorially concentrated FDI inflow on local labor market outcomes using district panel data from the Czech Republic. Toyota- Peugeot´s joint investment in Kolín is used to quantify the effect of FDI on the district unemployment outflow and...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model and proposes a theory to explain the main stylized facts about the growth of barter transactions in Russia during the 1990s. Because of the high opportunity cost of using fiat money, with a tight enough credit market it may be optimal for firms to...

Classical parametric estimation methods applied to nonlinear regression and limited-dependent-variable models are very sensitive to misspecification and data errors. This sensitivity is addressed by the theory of robust statistics which builds upon parametric specification, but provides...