This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data...

Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different...

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries – a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life...

In recent years there has been much policy discussion of the impact of unemployment benefits and other factors on unemployment duration in developed and transition countries. This paper presents first evidence on the determinants of unemployment duration in Ukraine. Using individual-level data...

In this paper we study the decline in total fertility rates in the Czech Republic during the transition process. To identify transition-specific features of this decline we use a multiperiod model of birth process and apply it to the family and fertility survey of 1998. In a standard duration...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately − 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition − and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time...

Long term trends in happiness and income are not related; short term fluctuations in happiness and income are positively associated. Evidence for this is found in time series data for developed countries, transition countries, and less developed countries, whether analyzed separately or pooled....

If society's goal is to increase people's feelings of well-being, economic growth in itself will not do the job. Full employment and a generous and comprehensive social safety net do increase happiness. Such policies are arguably affordable not only in higher income nations but also in countries...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR – the CIS and Baltic states – over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor...