Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/64368 
Year of Publication: 
2006
Series/Report no.: 
Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 05-125
Publisher: 
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, MI
Abstract: 
We estimate the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Applied to longitudinal data on manufacturing firms, our fixed effect and random trend models consistently fail to support workers' fears of job losses from privatization, and they never imply large negative effects on wages; only for domestic privatization in Hungary and Russia are small (3-5%) negative wage effects found. Privatization to foreign investors has positive estimated impacts on both employment and wages in all four countries. The negligible consequences of domestic privatization for workers result from effects on scale, productivity, and costs that are large but offsetting in Hungary and Romania, and from small effects of all types in Russia and Ukraine. The positive employment outcome under foreign ownership results from a substantial scale-expansion effect that dominates the productivity-improvement effect, and the positive wage outcome from a productivity effect that dominates the effect on costreduction.
Subjects: 
privatization
employment
wages
foreign ownership
Hungary
Romania
Russia
Ukraine
JEL: 
D21
G34
J23
J31
L33
P31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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