This paper analyses the employment adjustment of state- and privately-owned companies before and during the global crisis. Using Hungarian data, it finds that the net job creation rate is similar across the two ownership types before the crisis, but during the crisis state-owned companies have a...

I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large and sudden public sector wage increase, which raised real compensation by 40 percent in two years, changing the average public wage premium from minus 10 to plus 12 percent. Using a dataset covering about...

Using a large and unexpected public wage increase in Hungary which changed the public wage premium in 2002 from -17 to +7.5 percent from one month to the next, I study wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector. I proxy the exposure of corporate workers to the public sector with the...

We construct and analyze a unique database with 1992-99 information on privatization transactions and labor productivity for the entire surviving population of initially state-owned industrial corporations in Romania. The data permit us to describe the post-privatization ownership structure and...

Studies of public-private and foreign-domestic wage differentials face difficulties distinguishing ownership effects from correlated characteristics of workers and firms. This paper estimates these ownership differentials using linked employer-employee data (LEED) from Hungary containing 1.35mln...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...