I develop a general equilibrium model in which the quality of household financial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset market participation and returns across households. Moreover, search for financial returns enables the model to generate a more skewed equilibrium wealth distr...

This paper determines the equilibrium ownership structure in an emerging market deregulated by privatization and investment liberalization. It is shown that bidding competition in the privatization stage is necessary but not sufficient for reaching an efficient equilibrium market structure. Competition in the ensuing entry stage is also necessary. Otherwise, one firm can induce another to take ...

In the early 1990s, some 1400 collective farms were privatized in Hungary and became agribusinesses and other farm enterprises. An important step in privatization was the division of common property (cpd) among the members, and the choice of exiting individually or in groups with one's share, or of continuing in a successor farm enterprise as a shareholder. The study reports on privatization in...

The public health and the public education systems in the United States have encountered problems in quality of service, accountability, and availability of resources. Both systems are under pressure to adopt the general organizational reform of privatization. The debate over privatization in public education is contentious, but in public health, the shift of functions from the public to the pr...

We construct and analyze 1992-2001 panel data to study the effects of alternative postprivatization ownership structures on firm performance and the time profile of firm performance before and after privatization for the surviving population of initially stateowned enterprises in Romania. Applying OLS and fixed-effects methods to a variety of specifications, we find consistently positive, highl...

At a relatively early stage in comparison with other Central and Eastern European countries, Hungarian nephrologists together with private investors started a privatization of the dialysis sector, after political and economical revolution in this region. Privatization positively influenced, both quantitatively and qualitatively, this part of renal replacement therapy [1]. Looking at the rest of...

We investigate the effect of multimarket contacts on the privatization policy in mixed duopoly with price competition. There are two markets, one of which is served solely by the state-owned public firm, and the other is served by both public and private firms. Two markets are linked by the production technology of the public firm. In the general model, we first show that privatization is never...

This paper attempts to draw a synthetic picture of corporate governance in transition with emphasis on the efficiency implications of corporate governance, taking into account a) the heterogeneity of managerial skills, b) the diversity of restructuring tasks and financial situations of firms and c) political constraints. The focus is on the efficiency effects generated by the different kinds of...

Departing from the self-portrayal of the private security business as a normal, non-political sector at the service of states and other legitimate clients, this article argues that the rise of the private security business reinforces general trends towards techno-managerial, de-politicized, and militarized security practices. Even when firms behave by their own books, security privatization rec...