NBER Publications by Serguey Braguinsky

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported earnings and market values of cars owned by workers employed in foreign-owned and domestic firms in Moscow, Russia. We examine whether closer ties to foreign corporations result in the diffusion of transparency to private Russian firms. We find that Russian firms initially founded in partnerships with foreign corporations are twice as transparent in reported earnings of their workers as other Russian firms, but they are still less than half as transparent as foreign firms themselves. We also find tha...

Using Portugal's extensive matched employer-employee data set, this paper documents an unusual feature of the Portuguese economy. For decades, the entire Portuguese firm size distribution has been shifting to the left. We argue in this paper that Portugal's shrinking firms are linked to the country's anemic growth and low productivity. We show that the shift in the Portuguese firm size distribution is not reflected in other advanced industrial economies for which we have been able to obtain comparable data. Careful attempts to account for expanding data coverage, a structural shift from manufacturing to services, and aggressive efforts to "demonopolize" the Portuguese economy leave about half of this shift unexplained by these factors. So, what does explain the shift? We argue that P...

When a takeover is announced, the sum of the stock-market values of the firms involved often falls, and the value of the acquirer almost always does. Does this mean that takeovers do not raise the values of the firms involved? Not necessarily. We set up a model in which the equilibrium number of takeovers is constrained efficient. Yet, upon news of a takeover, a target's price rises, the bidder's price falls, and, most of the time the joint value of the target and acquirer also falls.