The transition paths from plan to market have varied markedly across countries. Central and Eastern European and the Baltic countries, which opted for a fast and profound transformation of their institutions including business climates, rapidly narrowed the productivity gap with advanced...

A firm actively manages its rival's beliefs by disclosing and concealing information on the size of its process innovation. The firm's disclosure strategy results from the trade-off between two effects on product market incentives. First, the firm's competitor learns that the firm is efficient,...

This paper examines how product market competition affects firms' timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives. It shows that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with Cournot and Bertrand...

This paper analyses the effect of a firm’s organizational capacity on the reported profitability of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Better organizational practices improve productivity and the potential taxable profits of firms. However, higher adoption of these practices may also enable...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

We study the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. With a given number of firms, deregulation reduces the size of rents per unit of output that firms can reap by training their...

Income equality and trust seem to go along with several other ingredients of social capital as determinants of economic growth across the globe. In a large sample of countries, equality in the distribution of income as measured by the World Bank and by The Standardized World Income Inequality...

Is the reputation of a firm tradeable when the previous owner has to retire even though ownership change is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners, observing only recent profits, bid for the firms on sale. Customers are...

We analyze vertical product differentiation in a model where a good's quality is unobservable to buyers before purchase, a continuum of quality levels is technologically feasible, and minimum quality is supplied under competitive conditions. After purchase the true quality of the good is...