During the past five years, there has been an important debate over the differing styles of market reforms in the formerly planned economies in East Asia versus Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (EEFSU). This paper puts forward three related propositions. First, the rapid growth of East...

By the end of 1991, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland have achieved a substantial degree of openness to foreign trade. In all three countries, trade is now de-monopolized and licensing and quotas playa very small role. Exchange controls have virtually disappeared for current-account...

This paper identifies obstacles hindering the transformation of centrally-planned economies (CPEs) into well-functioning market economies. The analysis is motivated by the recent experience with economic transformation and restructuring in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. The economic system in...

We conduct the first empirical test of the knowledge burden hypothesis, one of several theories advanced to explain increasing team sizes in science. For identification, we exploit the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier causing a sudden release of previously...

Recently, a large number of countries have undertaken major reforms that have led to a large increase in the number of new enterprises. After these reforms, however, it has taken a number of years before output and productivity have begun to grow. The thesis of this paper is that the process of...

This paper aims to provide a swift tour of the economic issues presented by vouchers and thus to fill an apparent gap in the literature for a basic survey of the subject. Among the issues it considers are: factors determining a voucher's cash-equivalence; reasons (such as paternalism,...

This paper reports on the current status of the microeconomic research on labor supply behavior. The purpose is to direct attention to microeconomic research that may be helpful in the continuing evaluation of aggregate models designed to explain the dynamic behavior of wages, employment and...

Since its launch in 2009 much has been written about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchains. While the discussions initially took place mostly on blogs and other popular media, we now are witnessing the emergence of a growing body of rigorous academic research on these topics. By the nature...

A number of market failures have been associated with R&D investments and significant amounts of public money have been spent on programs to stimulate innovative activities. In this paper, we review some recent microeconomic studies evaluating effects of government sponsored commercial R&D. We...

Microeconomic evidence reveals that the incidence and duration of unemployment in the 1930s varied significantly within the labor force. Long-term unemployment, which was especially high by historical standards, may have been exacerbated by federal relief policies