We contribute to the foreign direct investment (FDI) literature by providing first empirical evidence on the relative importance of location fac- tors for service and manufacturing FDI. This is of particular interest as the global stock of inward FDI in the service sector has become predominant in the last ten years. Based on a sectoral panel of eight new European member states in the period of 1998 to 2004 we perform a dynamic panel analysis al- lowing for individual adjustment periods across sectors. Results support our assumption that investment into the service sector, which is characterized by low installation costs, adjusts much faster to its desired level than manufactur- ing FDI. Furthermore, since services are mostly non-tradable, FDI into this sector is largely based on market-seeking motives while manufacturing FDI is also driven by international price competitiveness measured via real unit labor costs. (author´s abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

The dissertation examines the economic and behavioral factors influencing 'sector-switching' in Kazakhstan's health care industry. Sector-switching involves doctors moving from the national to the private system, which is not well established, thereby raising questions about why the switch occurs. It addresses the question: why health care professionals in Kazakhstan switch from the public sector to similar jobs in the private or nonprofit sectors? This study addresses a key issue in public management (sector switching) and also offers insights into the dynamics of the transition from a centralized economy to a market economy. As such, its findings have `real-world' applications beyond the particular case being studied i.e. Kazakhstan. This study is based on two simple claims. First, fundamental to the reforms that characterize transitional economies is effectively moving public sector employees to a nascent private sector. Second, such switches are unique because the risks related to transitioning to the private sector are different in transitional economies than in established market economies. Thus, the study considers: the degree to which economic and behavioral factors interact with different perceptions of sectoral risk, and subsequently shape the decision to move from the public sector to the private sector; in particular in Kazakhstan's health industry. The data supporting this study come from a survey covering approximately 1,000 health care professionals (practicing physicians working in both the public and private health care sectors) from nine regions of Kazakhstan. The data includes information about individual incentives physicians have for switching sections and their perceptions of perceived risks and uncertainties given the economic transition currently underway in Kazakhstan. The findings of the research suggest the strong support for the proposed hypotheses and have revealed some of the dynamics of sector switching behavior and the characteristics of "sector switchers" in Kazakhstan. The results demonstrate that physicians' overall job dissatisfaction, relative salary compared to physicians in a different sector, their risk-taking behavior, the national health care system's deterioration compared to previous years, as well as problems with providing medical services in the country affect physicians in making their decision to change their employment sector.

China and Russia – two giants in the group of emerging markets – continue to attract wide attention as evolving science and technological superpowers. However, both countries demonstrate mixed success in innovation development and are struggling to overcome the legacies of the former state planning system and accelerate their transition to effective national innovation systems. This study employs a number of theoretical constructs and evidence sources to evaluate the existing path dependencies and compare the achievements of China and Russia in fostering development and effective systems of innovation and governance. A detailed analysis of the state planning legacies is provided together with a study of innovation system transformation and the role of public policy in (re)building national innovation capabilities in China and Russia. The system-evolutionary approach is applied to provide a detailed assessment of the strategic effort undertaken by the governments of both countries. Several government failures and path dependencies seem to prevent the nations from implementing a more effective reform. Yet, there are a number of complementarities and opportunities for mutual learning where both countries can benefit from closer collaboration. The challenges of turning universities into research institutions, increasing productivity of state-owned enterprises, constructing effective science parks, promoting indigenous innovation, ensuring more even distribution of innovation development across regions, turning ‘brain drain’ into ‘brain gain’, and improving intellectual property rights protection are common in Russia and China. As a lens through which to identify and assess innovation systems transformation, the thesis examines emerging nanotechnology development in China and Russia. Nanotechnology is a new science and technology area where policies seem to be independent of many system weaknesses and contribute to breaking existing development lock-ins due to its explorative nature and assumed transformative capacity. Yet, a number of path dependencies do exist in this area but seem to play a marginal role in its progression. An early assessment is provided of nanotechnology impacts on broader socioeconomic development of China and Russia in six key areas: institutional development, knowledge flows, and network efficiency; research and education capabilities; industrial and enterprise growth; cluster and network development; regional spread; and product innovation.The conclusion summarizes the main findings, revisits the major research questions, links the analysis to the conceptual framework, and offers a number of policy recommendations that seem relevant to both Russia and China with a need to increase the transparency of innovation policy, improve the regulation for innovation process, and promote growth of the private sector to ensure effective technology transfer.Results from this study have been reported in various forms in the author’s articles published in Research Policy, Science and Public Policy, Review of Policy Research, International Journal of Economics and Business Research, and European Journal of Development Research as well as presented at a number of international conferences (see Appendix).

The diploma thesis focuses on inflation targeting in central Europe. It describes experience of three central European countries (Czech republic, Poland, Hungary) with inflation targeting. First part of thesis deals with theoretical aspects of inflation targeting. Next part brings closer look at application of inflation targeting in above - mentioned countries. Last part of thesis analyzes efficiency of inflation targeting.

The basic aim of this dissertation is to evaluate the predictive ability and accuracy of the existing and until now created corporate models predicting financial distress and verification of multinational force models. Partial goals must be filled to meet the basic objective and therefore the theoretical part is especially mapping models used and developed in the Czech Republic and other European economies, of which the emphasis is primarily on the former transition economies. These now post-transition economies have passed a similar political and economic development as the Czech Republic, and therefore prediction models created and used there could be transferable to the environment of the Czech economy and Czech companies whose financial health and conditions are assessed. The practical part is based on the author's own research, which is dedicated to the evaluation of prediction models when applied to Czech business entities differentiated according to belonging to a particular industry branch. During the models' evaluation the emphasis is on the fact whether they are national (Czech) or foreign models.

This dissertation builds on Cezar and Escobar's (2015) study of the relationship between institutional distance and foreign direct investment (FDI), but focuses instead on the nexus between corruption distance and FDI. Along the lines of their study, this dissertation uses a two-stage gravity model derived from the framework of heterogeneous firms to empirically estimate the impact of corruption distance on the inward and outward FDI of European transition economies. This dissertation contributes to the literature in several aspects. First, it proposes a new method for measuring corruption distance, considering the importance of firms' previous experience to the development of necessary skills for navigating a foreign business environment. Second, the empirical study distinguished the impact of corruption distance on the extensive and intensive margin by using a rich dataset with three different corruption indices, which thereby differs from most previous studies on this topic. This is also one of the few papers that specifically study this topic in the context of European transition economies. The results show that both conventional and adjusted corruption distance based on the control-of-corruption index only reduces the extensive margin of transition economies' FDI; and that the magnitude of...

The classical corporation, as described by Berle and Means (1932), was characterized by ownership that is dispersed between many small shareholders, yet control was concentrated in the hands of managers. This ownership structure created the conflict of interest between managers and dispersed shareholders. More recent empirical work (see, e.g., La Porta et al. (1999) and Barca and Becht (2001)) has shown that ownership in many countries around the world is typically concentrated in the hands of a small number of large shareholders. As a result, an equally important agency conflict arises between large controlling shareholders and minority shareholders. On the one hand, large shareholders can benefit minority shareholders by monitoring managers (Shleifer and Vishny, 1986, 1997). On the other hand, large shareholders can be harmful if they pursue private goals that differ from profit maximization or if they reduce valuable managerial incentives (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997; and Burkart et al., 1997). In the presence of several large shareholders, a conflict of interest may arise between these controlling shareholders (see, e.g., Zwiebel (1995), Pagano and Röell (1998), and Bennedsen and Wolfenzon (2000)). They can compete for control, monitor each other, or form controlling coalitions to share private benefits. The question arises as to what determines the role of controlling shareholders in various firm policies and performance. Previous literature has noted that the incentives to expropriate minority shareholders are often exacerbated by the fact that the capital invested by the controlling shareholders is relatively lower than the voting control they achieve through the use of dual class shares (i.e., shares with differential voting rights) or stock pyramids (e.g., Claessens et al., 2002). Moreover, the identity of the shareholder (e.g., family vs. financial institution) is important for understanding the role of controlling shareholders (see, e.g., Holderness and Sheehan (1988), Volpin (2002), Claessens et al. (2002), and Burkart et al. (2003)). Using Swedish data, Cronqvist and Nilsson (2003) show that the agency costs of family owners are larger than the agency costs of other controlling owners. The role of controlling shareholders in transition countries is exacerbated by the fact that the legal and general institutional environment remains underdeveloped. In such an environment, strong owners may be the second best option to weak legal protection of investors (La Porta et al., 1997, 1998). The transition countries of central and eastern Europe are experiencing increasingly concentrated control structures, typically with the controlling owner actively involved in the management of the firm (Berglöf and Pajuste, 2003). Moreover, experience from transition countries suggests that foreign direct investment, where investors take controlling positions, have been critical to the successful restructuring of privatized firms. This thesis consists of four self-contained chapters that empirically examine various corporate governance issues. The common theme throughout the thesis is the focus on large shareholders, their identity, as well as to whether they deviate from the principle of one share-one vote. In particular, I examine the effect of large shareholders on firm value (in the first and third chapters), dividend policies (in the second chapter), and stock returns (in the final chapter). The first two chapters employ the data from Finland, the third looks at companies in seven European countries where deviations from one share-one vote are common, and the final one explores the evidence from transition countries. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2004

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This dissertation investigates the nature by which social class membership and identity figure in judgements of transition institutions for the citizens of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Using a unique dataset and a series of novel conceptual frameworks, it argues that social class is, in effect, an operationalisation of socioeconomic risk and vulnerability-a premise from which several important implications derive. Drawing on social identity theory, it presents and tests a model of self-conceptualisation, grounded in the belief that individuals variously identify with their social classes, depending on their perceptions of shared socioeconomic risk. From this, it follows that strong identifiers should derive more relevant information about the emerging market system from class-level economic experiences, and therefore accord these cues greater weight in judgements about transition institutions. Beyond testing this theory of interpersonal variation, it invokes signal detection theory from cognitive psychology to determine whether cross-group differences in economic vulnerability are responsible for observed class differentials in reliance on class-based economic cues. It then takes a wider view of class-based economic cognition by considering how the process of transition, itself, influenced the evaluative calculus of post-communist citizens. Building on cognitive mobilisation theory in political science, it is posited that on-going exposure to the prevailing economic system endows these citizens with the ability to link their class-level economic experiences to the effects of the market mechanism. The analysis largely supports the constituent hypotheses, as well as the larger notion that perceptions of shared socioeconomic risk led social class experiences to figure prominently in the minds of post-communist citizens.