This paper analyses the determinants of happiness in seven Eastern European transition countries during the early phase of economic transition. The analysis of representative survey data in an ordered logit model shows that those core socio-demographic and economic variables known to be relevant...

A methodology to calibrate multifactor interest rate model for transition countries is proposed. The usual methodology of calibration with implied volatility cannot be used as there are no markets for regularly traded derivatives. The existence of such a markets is essential for this...

Monthly panel (1998-2003) data from regional labor offices in Latvia are used to analyze the matching process in a high unemployment – low labor demand environment and to evaluate the impact of active labor market policy programs on outflows from unemployment. Results suggest that the hiring...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

It has been suggested that …scal federalism is a good way to induce decentralized entities to behave parsimoniously, but this has been largely criticized in the literature, in particular because of the Common-Pool problem. In this paper, we present an extra facet of the latter problem. We...