The paper examines the behaviour of 100 firms interviewed regularly between 1993-4. It reaches the following conclusions:1) Following the inter-enterprise debt (IED) crisis of 1992, most firms have switched to a `pay-in-advance' system, which pushed firms towards a `hard budget constraint'...

The paper analyses the transition in Russia through a theoretical model in which job-to-job mobility plays a crucial role. It shows that job-to-job mobility is a key factor preventing a discontinuous break in unemployment and insulating wages in declining sectors from aggregate disequilibria. In...

In the political debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old. The paper explores this idea in a dynamic political-economy setup. We characterize sub-game perfect Markov equilibria where immigration policy and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security...

This study examines how the economic effects of elections in rural China depend on voter heterogeneity, for which we proxy with religious fractionalization. We first document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for a nearly nationally representative sample of...

Does the centre country of the International Monetary System enjoy an 'exorbitant privilege' that significantly weakens its external constraint as has been asserted in some European quarters? Using a newly constructed dataset, we perform a detailed analysis of the historical evolution of US...

The paper reviews the economic performance of the Republic of Ireland since 1945. Its focus is comparative: Ireland's record is assessed against the evidence in OECD and Penn Mark V datasets for a `convergence club' of European economies, and is found wanting. The comparison confirms that the...

This paper studies the role of unemployment in sterling’s inter-war experience. According to most narrative accounts, the proximate cause of the 1931 sterling crisis was a high and rising unemployment rate that placed pressure on British governments to pursue reflationary policies. We present...

Proposals for reducing high public debt are sometimes viewed with scepticism, both because of adverse consequences for growth and political economy considerations. This paper looks into the debt history of Britain, Germany and France, to gain more insights into why national debt was accumulated...

This paper assembles and reviews data on growth performance for East Germany. Conclusions are only tentative, as data reliability is still poor. Examining factor growth and total factor productivity performance, the paper arrives at three main conclusions. First, large-scale dismantling of...