The paper deals with the effects of local governments' interference with business affairs of publicly owned utilities. A partial model is presented to illustrate the consequences of "democratic control" for the public managers' effort and the efficiency of local public production. To check the...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in its current form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation of voting shares to emerging and...

This paper presents a theory model that simultaneously accounts for the financing decisions and ownership structure in affiliates of multinational firms. We find that affiliates of multinationals have higher internal and overall debt ratios and lower rental rates of physical capital than...

We consider a vertically related market characterized by downstream imperfect competition and by the monopolistic provision of an essential facility-based input, whose price is set by a social-welfare maximizing regulator. Our model shows that the regulatory knowledge about the cost for...

Only a few large, nationally-representative datasets include information on both the owner and the business. We briefly describe several of the most respected and up-to-date sources of data on entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and small businesses. More information including estimates of recent...

This paper investigates how the ownership and the procedure for the selection of firms operating in the local public transport sector affect their productivity. In order to compare different institutional regimes, we carry out a comparative analysis of 72 companies operating in large European...

In contrast to many other accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs), the Czech Republic experienced a shorter and less severe transition recession in the first half of the 1990s. The decline in output lasted two years and by 1995, real GDP had returned to its 1989 level....

This paper examines direct and indirect contributions of foreign firms and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to aggregate productivity growth. We focus our attention on foreign firms and small firms for three reasons. First, industrial policy in almost all countries is oriented towards...