عنوان

Ownership transformation and firm performance in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia

Number

TLets687281

Title Proper

Ownership transformation and firm performance in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Hashani, Alban

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Staffordshire University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2016

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Staffordshire University

Text preceding or following the note

2016

Text of Note

Privatization became a major component of economic policy around the world since the mid-1980s despite the conflicting theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for this policy. The inconclusive evidence, apart from reflecting genuine differences among countries and industries under investigation, is also the result of methodological and empirical problems this literature is beset with. This provides the motivation for this research project which intends to contribute to the literature by addressing some of these problems and also by applying it to a particular set of countries, the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, that have been either not studied at all or not studied as a group despite the fact that they share the same history and the same economic, political and social background which are distinct from other transition economies. As with the established empirical literature in the field, the research focuses on the impact of privatization on the performance of firms in the broad context of the neoclassical theory and its extensions. The thesis aims at investigating the impact of privatization on companies' performance in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, independent countries that emerged from the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In doing so, this thesis initially embarks on a critical review of theoretical and empirical literature, identifying their theoretical predictions and assessing their empirical validity, highlighting a variety of methodological problems from which the previous studies have suffered. The empirical investigation of this thesis uses Stochastic Frontier Analysis to estimate the efficiency of companies with different ownership structures. It also addressed the issue of missing data by employing a multiple imputation procedure. In addition, policy evaluation econometrics using matched difference-in-difference estimators is employed for estimating the causal relationship between ownership transformation and companies' performance. Special attention is paid to addressing the issue of selection bias which is the main challenge in evaluating the effect of privatization. The empirical results suggest that privatization is associated with improvement in companies' performance in terms of technical efficiency and sales levels, while it is associated with a significant drop in employment levels. Also, privatization is associated with improvement in performance over time. The results suggest that there is some heterogeneity across countries, industries and ownership types. In particular, they show that the average efficiency scores of companies in the successor states vary systematically across these countries with Slovenian companies being the most efficient, followed by those in Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia i.e., in some order of institutional and economic development in the region.

Hashani, Alban

Staffordshire University

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y