Real wages are a key determinant of marginal costs. The latter themselves are a driving force of inflation. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process. We model search and matching frictions in the labour market in an otherwise standard New- Keynesian closed economy...

This paper examines the change in operating and financial performance of Swedish firms that were either partly or fully privatized during the period of 1989-2007. Two different methods are used to empirically investigate the performance of privatized firms. First, accounting data prior to and...

We exploit organizational reforms in a foreign-owned bank in Central-East Europe to study the implementation of modern HRM policies in an emerging market context. We have branch-level data and use our knowledge of the process that led to the adoption of the reforms to implement two estimators...

We explore the pace of increase in returns to schooling during the transition from planning to market over time across a number of Central and Eastern European countries, Russia, and China. We use metadata from 33 studies of 10 transition economies covering a period from 1975 through 2002. Our...

Data on educational access show gender parity of pupils attending primary and secondary schools in transition countries. The first aim of this analysis is to examine whether the gender balance in educational access translates also into gender equality in educational achievement. There are...

The present paper argues that the effect of corruption on foreign ownership is not necessarily linear and depends on the level of host corruption. So long as the expected returns from foreign investments exceed its expected costs, higher host corruption will be associated with higher foreign...

The paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on regional unemployment during transition in Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is on Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) models and on comparison of them with the neoclassical tradition. In the typical neoclassical models, spatial...

According to the traditional 'optimum currency area' approach, not much will be lost from a very hard peg to a currency union if there has been little reason for variations in the exchange rate. This paper takes a different approach and highlights the fact that high exchange rate volatility may...

The UK was one of only three countries that granted free movement of workers to accession nationals following the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. The resulting large, rapid and concentrated migration inflow can be seen as a natural experiment that arguably corresponds closely to...

The production and diffusion of knowledge have increasingly been seen as potential causes of the observed international differences in total factor productivity and, in turn, as possible sources of economic growth. This paper presents the results of a causality study between business visits and...