A state monopoly in schooling followed the collapse of communism in Central Europe. The centrally planned system was abandoned. Systems comparable with educational voucher scheme, also known as school choice system, were introduced in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the early 1990s. The newly...

Religious participation is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, while Europeans tend to view sects more suspiciously than Americans. We propose an explanation for these patterns without assuming differences in preferences or market fundamentals. Religious markets may have...

In this paper we attempt to identify the characteristics of banks that are most likely to be at the origin of a banking crisis following a financial liberalization (FL) process. We do this analysis in response to the observed fact that FL processes arse often followed by banking crisis that cost...

Based on an original database, this paper provides an empirical study of Tsarist bond prices reactions after their repudiation by the Soviets. For the two years following the repudiation two striking features of a representative Tsarist bond traded in Paris are highlighted: first, the price...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the link between Financial Liberalization (FL) and the banking crisis that often follow. We also investigate the proposition, classical in development economics, that FL should result in an increase in supply of funds to the real sector. To...

Using panel regression for the period 1970-2000 the paper analyzes whether globalization has influenced the OECD countries’ social and overall spending as well as their tax rates on labor, consumption and capital. Accounting for potential endogeneity of the regressors, the results show that...

Using recent economic statistics from the peak period of Byzantine political and economic influence, we estimate the average income around the year 1000 to have been about 6 nomismata per capita per annum. This is then translated into current prices using two independent methods. They both yield...

We set up an open-economy, three-country version of the endogenous- mortality model of Lagerloef (forthcoming in the International Economic Review). The model is calibrated to pre-industrial mortality data from England, France and Sweden. Fitting parameters to match observed rates of correlation...

Both current and especially new member states of the European Union face incentives to distort the provision of public education away from internationally applicable education towards country-specific skills. This would mean educating too few engineers, economists and doctors, and too many...

This paper investigates one reason why some countries have experienced a strong increase in wage inequality over the last decades while others have not. The explanation is based on the link between the quality of education and induced technological change. A country with qualitatively...