The scope of the public sector (i.e. what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities) is a decision made by politicians. While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: By privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to o...

Using a comprehensive country-level panel data set covering the period from 1990 to 2001, we investigate the impact of privatization and competition in the telecommunications sector around the world. Full privatization, which gave private owners control rights, contributed substantially to improving the allocation of labor and capital, expanding service output and network penetration, and impro...

Following on the ‘success ‘of economic reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, best practice privatization re-emerged in most countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1990s. In Nigeria, privatization came as integral parts of Adjustment credits and was aimed at enhancing the efficiency of resource allocation of government. The core objectives are reducing fiscal deficits, building a broade...

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network industries (e.g. telecommunications and utilities). We present a model with agency problems, imperfect produc...

This article describes the main issues of the Brazilian Model of Telecommunication Reform (BMTR), presenting the privatization process and the new regulatory framework in Brazil, comparing with the experiences of the UK and US. The main targets of the reform were to enhance competition, to provide universal service, and to raise privatization revenues to reduce public debt. The trade-offs among...

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...