Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries starts approaching that of firms from advanced economies. Various development policies have been pursued to achieve this convergence. We test for this convergence in two economies that represent alternative models of implementing market-oriented development policies: the Czech Republic and Russia. Using 1992–2000 panel data on virtually all medium and large industrial firms in each country and accounting for endogeneity of ownership, we find that foreign ownership markedly improved the efficiency of firms, whereas domestic private ownership did not; domestic firms are not catching up to the (world) efficiency standard given by foreign-owned firms. This is due in part to a slower growth of efficiency in domestic firms over time. However, foreigners' acquisitions of more efficient domestic firms are also contributing to the gap. Domestic firms closer to the frontier are not more likely to catch up than firms farther from the frontier, although foreign firms do exhibit this behavior. The distance of Russian firms to the efficiency frontier is much larger than that of Czech firms. Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of reforms, neither model of development has resulted in convergence of domestic firms to the world standard.

We use two large samples of firms to assess the effects of business environment constraints, competition, export orientation, and ownership on firm performance. We deal with omitted variables, errors in variables, and endogeneity, and find that few business constraints affect performance. Replicating the analysis with Doing Business and Heritage Foundation indicators of the business environment yields similar results. In fact, country fixed effects, reflecting time-invariant differences in the business environment as well as other factors such as health care and education, matter more for firm performance than differences in the business environment across firms within countries.

We estimate returns to human capital during communism and the transition using data on 2,284 men in the Czech Republic. We show: (a) extremely low and constant rates of return to education under the communist wage grid and dramatic increases in transition, which do not differ by firm ownership, (b) radical changes in returns to several fields of study and “sheepskin effects” in both regimes, (c) identical wage experience profile in both regimes, (d) similar 1996 returns to human capital obtained in communism and in transition, and (e) changes in the interindustry wage structure. A decomposition of the variance of wages finds individuals' unobservable effects from communism to persist into transition, but most of the variance is due to unobservable effects introduced in the transition.

Strategic restructuring of firms through investment is key to a transition from plan to market. Using data on industrial firms in the Czech Republic during 1992-1998, we find that foreign-owned companies invest the most and cooperatives the least, that private firms do not invest more than state-owned ones, and that cooperatives and small firms are credit rationed. Given the large volume of nonperforming bank loans to firms and the high rate of investment of large state-owned and private firms, our findings also suggest that these firms operate under a soft budget constraint. Estimates of a dynamic model, together with the support for the neoclassical model, suggest that firms started to behave consistently with profit maximization.

Using firm-level data, we estimate the effects of the major wave of 1991 breakups of Czechoslovak state-owned enterprises on the subsequent performance of the ‘master enterprises’ and spun-off divisions. We estimate the performance effects of spinoffs by comparing the performance of enterprises that remained intact throughout the 1990–1992 period to the performance of the master enterprises that experienced spinoffs and the newly spun-off subsidiaries. Our estimates suggest that the breakups had a significant immediate effect on the productive efficiency and on the profitability of industrial firms in 1991, and that the effect became much less significant in 1992. The effect is a negative function of the size of the spinoff, being positive for small to slightly above average-sized spinoffs and negative for very large ones. We cannot reject the hypothesis that the estimated effect was identical for the spun-off subsidiaries and the master enterprises that experienced the spinoffs. Our 1991 estimates suggest that the large firms created under the centrally planned system suffered from inefficiencies that were alleviated by the breakups. The 1992 estimates are consistent with increased competition and the appropriation of profits by managers.