It has been shown that higher levels of subjective well-being lead to greater work productivity, better physical health and enhanced social skills. Because of these positive externalities, policymakers across the world should be interested in attracting and retaining happy and life-satisfied...

We use rich firm-level data and national input-output tables from 17 countries over the 2002-2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). We document that backward...

Even though informal employment is wide-spread in transition economies the literature on this phenomenon in the region is rather scarce. For policy makers it is important to know the incidence and the determinants of informal employment. In the first part of the paper we demonstrate that its...

Expectations of future socioeconomic mobility are an important determinant of current policy preferences. But how may these expectations be formed? Using Life in Transition survey data for a large set of transition economies and several Western European countries, this paper examines the link...

Economic disruption in East Germany at the time of unification resulted in a noticeable drop in life satisfaction. By the late 1990s East Germany's life satisfaction had recovered to about its 1990 level, and its shortfall relative to West Germany was slightly less than that before unification....

This study considers the pervasive tax evasion of transition economies, with particular reference to Russia's tax system. Starting with a survey of theoretical literature on tax evasion and corruption, it argues that, although standard tax theory offers many insights, certain special features of...

The macro economic stabilisation in Azerbaijan has been successful. Following cessation of conflict with Armenia, and decline of GDP by 60 per cent from 1990 to 1995, the government in effect implemented a big-bang reform process in 1995.The inflation rate has now declined to the lowest rate of...

A model is presented where the question of bank regulation is developed under a principal-agent scenario in a regime where the regulator has limited resources and banks may have an incentive to act ultra virus the regulatory standards.If banks are subject to random audit, then compliance is...