The Influence of Regulations on SOEs: The Perception of Polish SOEs’ Board Members

State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) originate from the centrally planned economy, but, despite privatization that took place in the ’90s, they play now an important role in the market economy. After the financial crisis of 2008, the role of the state as the shareholder has also been strengthened in the most developed economies of Western Europe and the US. Nonetheless, most of the studies on SOEs in the extant literature regard Chinese companies. The paper intends to at least partially fill this literature gap by focusing on the impact regulations have on SOEs. The study is multidisciplinary and comprises an analysis of legal regulations and a statistical analysis based on the results of a survey conducted among Polish SOEs management and supervisory boards. The study aims to: identify how regulations determine SOEs’ operations, identify SOEs’ stakeholders, identify the regulations’ influence on the agency problem in SOEs and reveal how commonly shared opinions about existing regulations could have influenced future legislative initiatives. Even though the study was conducted in Poland, our findings are significant for SOEs in other countries, as most of the identified SOEs-specific regulations are present in all legal systems to some extent.