3 down however much to clear the market. Finally, with large excess demand, no shares were sold and all shares would be on offer again in the next round. The first round took place on March 1, 1992 and the last one on December 22, 1992. Final exchange of shares for points followed the voucher bidding process. It did not take place until much later, however, in part due to the breakup of Czechoslovakia. After the exchange of shares for points was completed, secondary market trading started at the Prague Stock Exchange (PSE) and the so-called RMsystem, a parallel trading system.

Information was made available on each firm covering items such as business activity, number of employees, output and profit in 1989-91, and prior allocation of shares (to the state, domestic and foreign investors, etc.). Investment funds played a major role in analyzing finns' prospects on the basis of this and other information. Through the mechanism of sequential bidding rounds, much of this information gathering and analysis of firms' prospects was reflected in the final prices (see further Shafik, 1994b).

Ownership The final ownership structure of the 1491 finms which emerged from the voucher scheme is desciibed in Mejstrik et al. (1994). Table 1 provides the mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum for the shares held by the five investor classes at the end of the bidding rounds: the state (summing several classes, _states)_<sup>_3_</sup> _,_ investment fimds _(ipfs),_ domestic strategic investors _(dominv)_ and foreign strategic investors _(frnginv),_ and individuals _(idvs)._ The mean share of the state is 8.37%. Domestic and foreign direct investors own respectively 3.25% and 1.34% on average. The low average for direct domestic and foreign investors and the state reflects the fact that most of firms were majo-ritY privatized through the voucher method.

The IPFs average equity share is 39.39%. The top 10 investment funds _(topl_10)_ own on average 38.36% of shares, close to the average share owned by all- funds combined, consistent with the fact that the top 10 funds own about 72% of all points that were allocated to funds (Mejstrik et al, 1994). (Shafik 1994a and Mejstrik et al. 1994b also report that, while the investment funds acquired about 72% of the voucher points, the funds ended up owning a slightly lower fraction of shares on offer as they bid for more expensive firms.) Individuals own on average 36.53 % of a given firm, slightly less than the average shares for all funds combined. In aggregate, the investment funds hold much more shares than households, however. This implies that individuals preferred to use their vouchers to acquire equity of smaller firms, in which they established a relatively larger equity stake. On average, about 1 1 % of equity was not sold (this share is subsequently summed with _state)._ Across firms, ownership is quite varied, as the respective minimum, maximum and standard deviations in Table 1 show. The greatest range is for shares held by all individuals combined, followed by shares held by investment funds combined. The shares for these investor classes vary between close to 0% and 100%. For direct domestic and foreign investors and the 3Shares held by the National Property Fund (through permanent, temporary and restimution share holdings), shares to be transferred to municipalities, and shares to be sold through banks.