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The article aims at analyzing a particular occupational privilege of employees, commonly referred to as a benefits package. This social privilege is considered a real social and legal phenomenon by a large number of academics. This is because no legal regulations on the privatization and commercialization of Polish companies actually imposed it. The origin of this specific privilege lies in the pragmatic attitude of employees to the process of privatization of companies and selling their stocks to strategic investors. This type of agreements was supposed to protect staff from radical restructuring which the investor could implement upon buying the company. Owing to this privilege, employees were able to establish their own space of social security in the factory. The article presents examples of such documents, discusses their content and possible sanctions for the new owner of the factory (the signatory of the document) if the provisions of the document are not complied with.

The article aims at analyzing a particular occupational privilege of employees, commonly referred to as a benefits package. This social privilege is considered a real social and legal phenomenon by a large number of academics. This is because no legal regulations on the privatization and commercialization of Polish companies actually imposed it. The origin of this specific privilege lies in the pragmatic attitude of employees to the process of privatization of companies and selling their stocks to strategic investors. This type of agreements was supposed to protect staff from radical restructuring which the investor could implement upon buying the company. Owing to this privilege, employees were able to establish their own space of social security in the factory. The article presents examples of such documents, discusses their content and possible sanctions for the new owner of the factory (the signatory of the document) if the provisions of the document are not complied with.

Strobe Talbott expresses his interest in Isaac Shapiro's use of postwar Japanese industrial policy as model for Russia's economic transition, describes objectives of U.S. economic relations with Russia, and notes Group of Seven endorsement of Clinton administration initiatives.

Strobe Talbott thanks Jack Sustman for his letter concerning possible strategic direction of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and economic reform in former Soviet republics, and describes decisions reached at economic summit in Tokyo.

Strobe Talbott thanks Boris Nemtsov for his letter requesting support for International Finance Corporation proposal that would create regional privatization fund for Russia and notes that recent summit in Tokyo established similar restructuring program for Russia.

Strobe Talbott provides Warren Christopher with talking points for off-the-record meeting with New York Times editorial board about political conditions, elections, and referenda in Russia; international financial aid to Russia; Special Privatization and Restructuring Program; possible impact of Russian elections on U.S. assistance to newly independent states; and other topics.

Using a unique sample of newly privatized firms from 59 countries, this article provides new evidence about the agency costs of state ownership and new insight into the corporate governance role of country-level institutions. Consistent with agency theory, we find strong and robust evidence that state ownership is positively related to corporate cash holdings. Moreover, we find that the strength of country-level institutions affects the relation between state ownership and the value of cash holdings. In particular, as state ownership increases, markets discount the value of cash holdings more in countries with weaker institutions.

We compile an IO toolkit for aggregative games with positive and normative comparative statics results for asymmetric oligopoly in the short and long run. We characterize the class of aggregative Bertrand and Cournot oligopoly games, and the subset for which the aggregate is a summary statistic for consumer welfare. We close the model with a monopolistically competitive fringe for long-run analysis. Remarkably, we show strong neutrality properties in the long run across a wide range of market structures. The results elucidate aggregative games as a unifying principle in the literature on merger analysis, privatization, Stackelberg leadership, and cost shocks.

By employing a novel, hand-collected sample of withdrawn and completed share issue privatizations, we show that both groups undergo comparable restructuring processes over the 3 years preceding the event. We employ matching procedures to explicitly control for the restructuring effect, isolating the effect of the ownership transfer from state to private investors on corporate policies and performance. We document that, absent the ownership transfer, most of the gains realized during the restructuring process are reabsorbed over the posttreatment period. The transition from state to private ownership thus represents a necessary condition for the long-term success of privatization programs.