The inefficiency of Soviet-type economies results from their monopolized production structure, which makes soft budget constraints almost inevitable, as enterprises have bargaining power and must face expropriative tax rates for macroeconomic stability. Systemic reform aims to improve...

A key feature of Soviet-type economies is the excessive concentration of production and the skewed size distribution of enterprises. This is the root cause of the `soft budget constraint' and a natural outcome of the political economy of these countries. Given entrenched political support for a...

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labour supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying...

We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behaviour of women 30-40 years old, born in the US, but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labour force participation and total fertility rates from the...

Married women's labour force participation has increased dramatically over the last century. Why this has occurred has been the subject of much debate. This paper investigates the role of culture as learning in this change. To do so, it develops a dynamic model of culture in which individuals...

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in woman’s country of...

This paper discusses three aspects of stabilization and international integration: the real wage; inflation; and the real effective exchange rate. Using empirical evidence on inflation and the real effective exchange rate, we evaluate the gradualist option represented by the Hungarian reforms....

This paper examines the changing incentives for the efficient management of firms in Eastern Europe. It contrasts the internal constitution of the firm (its governance and reward structures) with the various constraints imposed on the firm's activities by external conditions in capital, labour...

In this paper we focus on the macroeconomic framework for the transformation of the formerly socialist economies of Central Europe into capitalist mixed market economies. We construct a simple model to compare the situations in Hungary and Poland on the eve of the transformation before the new...

This paper surveys the emerging labour markets of the transforming economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Pissarides's model of equilibrium unemployment highlights the dynamics of labour markets as an important factor in the transformation, and labour market institutions will determine the...