Using a comprehensive country-level panel data set covering the period from 1990 to 2001, we investigate the impact of privatization and competition in the telecommunications sector around the world. Full privatization, which gave private owners control rights, contributed substantially to...

Johnson, McMillan and Woodruff (2002) examine the relative importance of property rights and external finance in several Eastern European countries, and find property rights to be overwhelmingly important, while external finance explains very little of firm reinvestment. McMillan and Woodruff...

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of...

This paper examines how a million Manchus, as a dominant minority, partly relied on a cross-ethnic personnel strategy to rule over 100 million Han Chinese for 267 years. Under this strategy, Han elites were appointed to handle daily administrative issues, on top of whom Manchu superiors were...

Using a comprehensive country-level panel data set covering the period from 1981 to 1998, we examine the impact of privatization and competition in the telecommunications sector around the world. Privatization contributed substantially to labor shedding, output growth, network expansion, and...

Because each of the agent's multitasks can have several measures, the multitask agency theory predicts that incentive devices based on these measures can be complements or substitutes. However, the existing empirical literature on multitask agency considers only complementarity. This paper...

We investigate the determinants of regulatory reforms between 1990 and 1998 in 50 developing countries. We find that the reforms are attributable to differences in the configurations of interest groups and in the political structure - in particular, the decision-making mechanisms and the...

Using data from a recent national survey on the ownership reform of state-owned enterprises in China, we study the effects of reducing politician control and agency problems on a number of reform outcomes. Taking into account the endogenous nature of the reform, we find that these outcome...

Although it had a a lower income level than India in 1980, China's 2006 per capita gross domestic product stands more than twice that of India's. This paper investigates the role of the business environment in explaining China's productivity advantage using recent firm-level survey data. The...

Although it had a a lower income level than India in 1980, China's 2006 per capita gross domestic product stands more than twice that of India's. This paper investigates the role of the business environment in explaining China's productivity advantage using recent firm-level survey data. The...