A significant recent development has been the extension of market processes to activities which were previously provided by the public sector. A central feature of newly privatized markets is the emergence of widespread forms of contracting. Explicit contracting is used where in the past...

Patterns of corporate control vary markedly across countries. This paper examines the reasons for these differences and their consequences for corporate performance. It finds that they primarily result from differences in the ownership of firms and their legal forms. These affect the relative...