Banks perform similar functions all over the world. Nevertheless, the banking systems around the world are very different. This paper analyses how the difference affects local firms as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. For my project, I combine banking and economic data of five EU...

Chinese state capitalism has been treated as essentially synonymous with state-owned enterprises (“SOEs”). But drawing a stark distinction between SOEs and privately owned enterprises (“POEs”) misperceives the reality of China's institutional environment and its impact on the formation...

Privatization of government services has been touted as a cost-savings approach for state agencies, promising to harness the efficiencies of market forces to overcome the perceived inefficiencies of bureaucracies. Empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that such savings rarely materialize,...

International organizations promote privatization as precondition for economic development. But is there really too little privatization? This political economy model asks for the incentives of governments to privatize or restructure a state-owned firm. Different government types are compared to...

International organizations promote privatization as precondition for economic development. But is there really too little privatization? This political economy model asks for the incentives of governments to privatize or restructure a state-owned firm. Different government types are compared to...

We assembled a large panel of project-level technical and financial data and country-level economic, institutional, political, and governance variables to assess the determinants of private financing of infrastructure in emerging markets and developing economies. Controlling for economic...

The empirical effect of enterprise autonomy on the performance of state-owned enterprises is surprisingly scant despite autonomy being a preferred reform instrument in many countries, and of ten chosen over privatization. Using longitudinal data on performance contracts for state-owned...

We document evidence of corruption in Chinese state asset sales. These sales involved stakes in partially privatized firms, providing a benchmark - the price of publicly traded shares - to measure underpricing. Underpricing is correlated with deal attributes associated with misgovernance and...

Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...