The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

Mongolia's mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling...

Mongolia's informal sector has expanded far more quickly during the transition than its formal sector, largely because of greater ease of entry into the informal sector. Current policy discourages entry into the formal sector. The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's...

Mass privatization is the centerpiece of policies aiming to sever the old links between state and enterprise and to channel interactions into modern legal and regulatory forms. Thus, enterprise-state relations are an important indicator of the effect of mass privatization. We present a detailed...

To ascertain the degree to which enterprises have soft budgets and to find the causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One-quarter of the enterprises face soft budgets, a large proportion of...

The success of mass privatization requires either that new owners are active in corporate affairs or that the original owners sell their shares to those who are willing to be active: voice or exit is necessary. We examine the structure of ownership and the extent of voice and exit in one...

Transparency -- sunshine -- is often touted as a core element of the governance agenda, and one that is most important in environments with low transparency to begin with. In a provocative paper published in the American Political Science Review, Edmund Malesky, Paul Schuler, and Anh Tran...