How valuable are the education and skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This paper uses data for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998, to throw light on this question. We find that returns to schooling reach 10 percent early on and remain at this high level....

This paper explores the effect of mass privatization and the development of a new private sector in Russia on the wage and skill distributions in the private and state sectors of the economy. Two questions this paper seeks to answer are: (1) Does wage-setting behavior in privatized firms...

While a variety of studies analysed the benign effects of privatisation on firm performance under post-socialist transition using financial data very little is known about how the apparent productivity gains were achieved. This paper follows a weaving mill from 1998 to 1997 on its way of...