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Essays on Governance and Economic Performance
Kochanova, Anna ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Palda, Filip (referee) ; Domadenik, Polona (referee)
This thesis examines the relationship between governance and economic performance from different perspectives. It is also related to private sector and countries' economic development. In the first chapter I focus on bureaucratic corruption and examine how it affects firm performance in Central and Eastern European countries. While previous research relies on the data from the BEEPS (Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey) solely, which suffers from excessive non-reporting of firm performance, I combine the data on bribery practices from the BEEPS with reliable and large firm performance data from the Amadeus database. Focusing on within-firm variation, I find that a higher bribery level negatively affects both the sales and labor productivity growth of firms. Nevertheless, conditional on a given level of bureaucratic corruption in a narrowly defined local market, a higher unevenness of firms' bribing behavior within such a market appears to facilitate firm performance. The chance of receiving benefits from bribery may be one reason why corruption does not vanish in spite of its overall damaging effect. In the second chapter, coauthored with Vahagn Jerbashian, we concentrate on the diffusion of telecommunication technologies as an instrument of reduction the costs of entry....
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