The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In postcommunist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and vary across regions, coinciding with differences in policies and institutional development. In China relatively more estimates suggest that privatization to domestic owners improves the level of performance. Concentrated private ownership has a stronger positive effect on performance than dispersed ownership in the post-communist economies, but foreign joint ventures rather than wholly owned foreign firms have a positive effect in China. Worker or collective ownership does not have a negative effect. In the postcommunist economies new firms are equally or more efficient than firms privatized to domestic owners, and foreign start-ups are more efficient than domestic ones. Privatization is not associated with lower employment. When accompanied by complementary reforms, privatization has a positive effect on economic growth. Three factors appear to drive the more positive effect of privatization to foreign than domestic owners. Domestic managers have more limited skills and access to world markets, domestically privatized firms have been more subject to tunneling and in some countries new large shareholders artificially decreased performance. The important policy implication is that privatization per se does not guarantee improved performance, at least not in the short-to medium-run. Type of private ownership, corporate governance, access to know-how and markets, and the legal and institutional system matter for firm performance.

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We show how bad and good volatility propagate through the forex market, i.e., we provide evidence for asymmetric volatility connectedness on the forex market. Using highfrequency, intra-day data of the most actively traded currencies over 2007-2015 we document the dominating asymmetries in spillovers that are due to bad, rather than good, volatility. We also show that negative spillovers are chiefly tied to the dragging sovereign debt crisis in Europe while positive spillovers are correlated with the subprime crisis, different monetary policies among key world central banks, and developments on commodities markets. It seems that a combination of monetary and real-economy events is behind the positive asymmetries in volatility spillovers, while fiscal factors are linked with negative spillovers.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European currencies and euro/dollar foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily realized volatility of a given exchange rate depends both on its own lags as well as on the lagged realized volatilities of the other exchange rates. We find evidence of statistically significant intra-regional volatility spillovers among the Central European foreign exchange markets. With the exception of the Czech currency, we find no significant spillovers running from euro/dollar to the Central European foreign exchange markets. To measure the overall magnitude and evolution of volatility transmission over time, we construct a dynamic version of the Diebold-Yilmaz volatility spillover index, and show that volatility spillovers tend to increase in periods characterized by market uncertainty. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: C50, F31, G15.

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.

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. JEL classifications: C33, D20, G32, G34, L20.

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