Jan Hanousek

Effects of Privatization and Ownership in Transition Economies

In this paper, we evaluate what we have learned to date about the effects of privatization from the experiences during the last fifteen to twenty years in the postcommunist (transition) economies and, where relevant, China. We distinguish separately the impact of privatization on efficiency, profitability, revenues, and other indicators and distinguish between studies on the basis of their econometric methodology in order to focus attention on more credible results. The effect of privatization is mostly positive in Central Europe, but quantitatively smaller than that to foreign owners and greater in the later than earlier transition period. In the Commonwealth of Independent States, privatization to foreign owners yields a positive or insignificant effect while privatization to domestic owners generates a negative or insignificant effect. The available papers on China find diverse results, with the effect of nonstate ownership on total factor productivity being mostly positive but sometimes insignificant or negative.

Origin and concentration

We analyse the effects of different types and concentration of ownership on performance using a large population of firms in the Czech Republic after mass privatization. Specifications based on first-differences combined with instrumental variables show that the performance effects of different types and concentration of ownership are limited when compared to earlier studies. Often, concentrated ownership has a positive effect, a finding that supports the agency theory. The positive effect of foreign ownership is detected primarily for majority ownership and for ownership by foreign industrial firms. The state as a holder of the golden share has a positive effect on employment and sometimes, also on output and profitability. Overall, our results highlight the benefits of strategic restructuring accompanied by an inflow of new capital and managerial culture.

The Reaction of Asset Prices to Macroeconomic Announcements in New EU Markets: Evidence from Intraday Data

We estimate the impact of macroeconomic news on composite stock returns in three emerging European Union financial markets (the Budapest BUX, Prague PX-50, and Warsaw WIG-20), using intraday data and macroeconomic announcements. Our contribution is twofold. We employ a larger set of macroeconomic data releases than used in previous studies and also use intraday data, an excess impact approach, and foreign news to provide more reliable inferences. Composite stock returns are computed based on five-minute intervals (ticks) and macroeconomic news are measured based on the deviations of the actual announcement values from their expectations. Overall, we find that all three new EU stock markets are subject to significant spillovers directly via the composite index returns from the EU, the U.S. and neighboring markets; Budapest exhibits the strongest spillover effect, followed by Warsaw and Prague. The Czech and Hungarian markets are also subject to spillovers indirectly through the transmission of macroeconomic news. The impact of EU-wide announcements is evidenced more in the case of Hungary, while the Czech market is more impacted by U.S. news. The Polish market is marginally affected by EU news. In addition, after decomposing pooled announcements, we show that the impact of multiple announcements is stronger than that of single news. Our results suggest that the impact of foreign macroeconomic announcements goes beyond the impact of the foreign stock markets on Central and Eastern European indices. We also discuss the implications of the findings for financial stability in the three emerging European markets.

Data Watch: Research Data from Transition Economies

Ten years into the transition from communism in the countries of the former Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe, a cursory search of the EconLit database turns up hundreds of empirical studies published in refereed journals that deal with various issues in transition economies. Even so, we suspect that many economists are prevented from making full use of the possibilities offered by the transition by the difficulties of obtaining and interpreting data from the region. The purpose of this brief essay is to indicate some possible sources for data that can be used for economic analysis, as well as some cautions regarding the use of these data.

The relationship between economic factors and equity markets in Central Europe

This paper investigates the possibility that newly-emerging equity markets in Central Europe exhibit semi-strong form efficiency such that no relationship exists between lagged values of changes in economic variables and changes in equity prices. We find that while there are connections between the real economy and equity market returns in Poland and Hungary, these links occur with lags, suggesting the possibility of profitable trading strategies based on public information and rejecting semi-strong efficiency. For the Czech Republic the situation is more complex. In recent periods, little connection exists between lagged economic variables and equity market returns. Although this finding might be viewed as consistent with semi-strong efficiency, in fact there is also little connection between current economic values and stock prices in the Czech Republic. Thus, instead of processing information efficiently, the Czech market appears to be entirely divorced from the real world. It is suggested that the difference in the current status of these markets may be due to the different methods by which they were created.

Foreign News and Spillovers in Emerging European Stock Markets

We analyze foreign news and spillovers in the emerging EU stock markets (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). We employ high-frequency five-minute intraday data on stock market index returns and four classes of EU and U.S. macroeconomic announcements during 2004???2007. We account for the difference of each announcement from its market expectation and we jointly model the volatility of the returns accounting for intraday movements and day-of-the-week effects. Our findings show that intraday interactions on the new EU markets are strongly determined by mature stock markets as well as the macroeconomic news originating thereby. We show that strong contemporaneous links across markets are present even after controlling for macroeconomic announcements. Finally, in terms of specific announcements, we are able to show the exact sources of macro news spillovers from the developed foreign markets to the three new EU markets under research.

The power of negative thinking: corruption, perception and willingness to bribe in Ukraine

This study provides an empirical analysis of the association between corruption perception and the willingness to offer bribes, as well as of the influence of different sources of information on corruption perception in the Ukraine. The higher the perceived corruption in an organization, the more probable it is that a person dealing with that organization will offer a bribe, therefore supporting corruption. Since corruption scandals in Ukraine seldom result in legal action, information about corruption in the mass media might actually encourage people to give bribes. This study found that corruption perception is one of the key factors in giving a bribe and that its positive/negative effects strongly depend on institutions and government policies.

Do Stock Markets Promote Economic Growth

One of the most enduring debates in economics is whether financial development causes economic growth or whether it is a consequence of increased economic activity. Little research into this question, however, has used a true causality framework. This paper fills this lacuna by using Granger-causality tests and finds little evidence of a causal relationship going from stock market development to economic growth. We do find evidence that stock market development can cause currency appreciation, which may confound studies that use dollar denominated measures of economic growth.

Origin and Concentration: Corporate Ownership, Control and Performance

We analyze the effects of different types and concentration of ownership on performance using a population of firms in a model transition economy after mass privatization. Specifications based on first-differences and unusual instrumental variables show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the effects of privatization and different types of ownership are limited and many types of private owners do not generate performance that is different from that of firms with state ownership. Concentrated ownership has a positive effect but only in some instances and a positive effect of foreign ownership is detectable primarily for majority ownership and foreign industrial firms. The effects of concentrated ownership support the agency theory and go against theories stressing the positive effects of managerial autonomy. Our results are also consistent with managers or stockholders “looting” the firms. The state as a holder of the golden share has a positive effect on employment and in some specifications also on output and profitability. Overall, our results suggest that the expectations and earlier findings of positive effects of privatization on performance were premature, with the effects of many types of ownership being indistinguishable from that of state ownership.

Divestitures, privatization and corporate performance in emerging markets

We use new firm-level data to examine the effects of firm divestitures and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the fact that divestitures and ownership are potentially endogenous variables. We find that divestitures increase the firms profitability but do not alter its scale of operations, while the effect of privatization depends on the resulting ownership structure - sometimes improving performance and sometimes bringing about decline. The effects of privatization are thus more nuanced than suggested in earlier studies. Methodologically, our study provides evidence that it is important to control for changes in ownership when analyzing divestitures and to control for endogeneity, selection and data attrition when analyzing the effects of divestitures and privatization. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2009 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.