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...

The objective of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the consequences of worker displacement in France and the United States. I estimate wage losses of displaced workers in the two countries and examine the relative contribution of two important sources of post-displacement wage...

We estimate returns to schooling using a retrospective work history survey covering more than 4,000 workers over the period 1950 to 1994, with particular emphasis to the returns to schooling for workers who attended institutes of higher education and who graduated from college. We find evidence...

In this paper we first explore the effects of differences in labor market institutions and the degree of market liberalization on the size and composition of gender wages gaps in China's urban labor markets. We use enterprise-ownership type, enterprise age, and workers' methods of finding...

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....

Based on insights from Joseph Berliner's work on innovation in the Soviet centrally planned economy and its reform variants, we analyze process innovation (technological development) and product development in restructuring Hungarian companies from 1992 to 1995. Using data from a survey...

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...

Labour market and financial information is combined to explore the effect of the quality of labour employed on the profitability of the firm. The quality of labour is measured as the portion of wage differentials that cannot be explained by the human capital model. Profitability of Hungarian...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon...

In transition economies, there may be a significant mismatch between the types of skills that workers possess and the types of skills that the new economy demands. We consider this problem of human capital mismatch along the dimensions of training type (holding the level) and occupation. We...