Employment and Wage Effects of Privatization: Evidence from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Economic Journal. 2010;120:683-708. Abstract
Employment and Wage Effects of Privatization: Evidence from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine
We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatisation on employment and wages. The results consistently reject job losses and never imply large wage cuts from either domestic or foreign privatisation. The domestic privatisation estimates are close to zero for employment; for wages, they are negative but small in magnitude. Estimated foreign privatisation effects are nearly always positive and sometimes large for both outcome variables. We interpret the employment and wage results in terms of underlying scale, productivity, and cost effects of privatisation.
The Productivity Effects of Privatization: Longitudinal Estimates from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Journal of Political Economy. 2006;114(1):61-99. Abstract
The Productivity Effects of Privatization: Longitudinal Estimates from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine
This paper estimates the effect of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using comprehensive panel data on initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. We exploit the data’s longitudinal dimension to control for pre-privatization selection and estimate long-run impacts. The estimates are robust to functional form, but sensitive to selection controls. Our preferred random growth estimates imply positive MFP effects of 15% in Romania, 8% in Hungary, and 2% in Ukraine, but a negative 3% effect in Russia. The foreign privatization effect is larger (18–35%) in all countries. Positive domestic effects appear immediately in Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine and continue growing thereafter, but only emerge 5 years after privatization in Russia.