Although the development of a new private sector is generally considered crucial to economic transition and development, there has been little empirical research on the determinants of startup firm growth. This paper uses panel data techniques to analyze a survey of 297 new s small enterprises...

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this...

American employment policy for displaced workers started in the Great Depression with programs for the employment service, unemployment insurance, work experience, and direct job creation. Assistance for workers displaced by foreign competition emerged in the 1960s along with formalized programs...

To evaluate the effectiveness of self-employment assistance to the unemployed in Hungary and Poland more than 5,500 follow-up interviews were conducted in early 1997 by employees of local labor offices with persons in self-employment participant and comparison group samples. Wide ranging...

To ease the hardship associated with worker dislocation and to maintain social stability during the transition to markets, the governments of Hungary and Poland provide labor force members with unemployment compensation and a variety of active labor programs (ALPs). Follow-up surveys of...

Many individuals are grappling with the issue of whether to provide workers with training that upgrades the workers' basic academic skills. The corollary questions that flow from this issue are how to provide the training, how much training should be provided, and who should pay for the...

Despite tremendous recent interest in the subject of student debt by both researchers and policymakers, little is known about how the distribution of college graduate debt has been evolving and what factors can explain it. We use National Postsecondary Student Aid Study data from 1990 through...

Barnow, Trutko, and Piatak focus on whether persistent occupation-specific labor shortages might lead to inefficiencies in the U.S. economy. They describe why shortages arise, the difficulty in ascertaining that a shortage is present, and how to assess strategies to alleviate the shortage.