The 40 years of socialist regime in East Germany were characterized by a massive anti-entrepreneurship policy. We investigate the reemergence of entrepreneurship in East Germany during its transformation to a market economy following the collapse of the East German state in 1989. It took about...

The ambition of this paper is to analyse real exchange rate dynamics in Macedonia relying on a highly disaggregated dataset. We complement the indirect evidence reported in Loko and Tuladhar (2005) and we provide direct evidence on the irrelevance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for overall...

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of ethnic diversity on economic development. Ethnically polarized societies are less likely to agree on the provision of public goods and more likely to engage in rent seeking activities providing lower levels of social capital. Initial conditions...

This study seeks to determine the extent to which countries of the former Soviet Union are "infected" by the Dutch Disease. We take a detailed look at the functioning of the transmission mechanism of the Dutch Disease, i.e. the chains that run from commodity prices to real output in...

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of ethnic diversity on economic development. Ethnically polarized societies are less likely to agree on the provision of public goods and more likely to engage in rent seeking activities providing lower levels of social capital. Initial conditions...

This Paper sets out to analyse the ever-growing literature on equilibrium exchange rates in the new EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe in a quantitative manner using meta-regression analysis. We study the extent to which the estimated real misalignments reported in the literature...

This paper investigates the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for two acceding countries (Bulgaria and Romania), two accession countries (Croatia and Turkey) and two CIS countries (Russia and Ukraine). The paper first studies the basic assumptions of the Balassa-Samuelson effect using...

This paper surveys recent advances in empirical studies of the monetary transmission mechanism (MTM), with special attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results indicate that the strength of the exchange rate pass-through substantially declined over time mainly due to a fall in...

Investment in network infrastructure can boost long-term economic growth in OECD countries. Moreover, infrastructure investment can have a positive effect on growth that goes beyond the effect of the capital stock because of economies of scale, the existence of network externalities and...

This paper studies drivers of high-frequency (daily) dynamics of the South African rand vis-à-vis the dollar from January 2001 to July 2007. We find strong nonlinear effects of commodity prices, perceived country and emerging market risk premium and changes in the dollar-euro exchange rate on...