Simeon Djankov

TL;DR: In this article, the authors follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi, India and find that bureaucrats arbitrarily fail drivers at a high rate during the driving exam, irrespective of their ability to drive.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the happiness gap is explained by how citizens in post-communist countries perceive their governments and link their life satisfaction to higher perceived corruption and weaker government performance, concluding that the transition from central planning is still incomplete, at least in the psychology of people.

TL;DR: Djankov et al. as discussed by the authors analyzed isolation programs for financially distressed firms in transition economies based on empirical evidence from Romania, the program that had the greatest coverage and concluded that despite substantial costs, it neither delivered tangible improvements in operational performance nor improved the process of privatization or liquidation of large loss-making enterprises.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the activities of the Bulgarian competition office, the Commission for the Protection of Competition, during 1991-95 and found that instead of hard core anticompetitive behavior, much of the Commission's activities have centered on unfair competition (e.g., false advertising, trademark infringement, and the behavior of ex-employees of specific enterprises).

TL;DR: The authors provides the first global look at how gender discrimination by the law affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades using the World Bank's newly constructed Women, Business and the Law database.