Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...

Most of the time the budget constraints in the socialist economies were harder than in developing countries and no less hard than in developed countries. The soft budget constraints (SBC) in socialist economies were not pervasive, as most authors believe, but selective, i.e. involved...

This paper analyzes the migration behavior of ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1989 to 1999. The two main migration movements have been return migration of ethnic groups to their titular nation and migration of all ethnic groups to the Russian Federation. Using factor...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

Re-licensing requirements for professionals that move across borders are widespread. In this paper, we measure the returns to an occupational license using novel data on Soviet trained physicians that immigrated to Israel. An immigrant re-training assignment rule used by the Israel Ministry of...

During the 20th century, Russian women were assigned the triple role of social and political activists, workers, caregivers and mothers. This paper makes an overview of the main steps undertaken first by the Soviet and later by the modern Russian governments to influence family formation models...