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...

Along with political and economic changes, the fall of the socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union brought about fundamental institutional reforms. Several studies have examined the causes of the increasing unhappiness which accompanied the transition process,...

This paper analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Blundell and Bond, 1998)...

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...

This paper discusses recent bank runs in seven transition economies (Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania), comparing them against the older US experience and theoretical research.Bank runs seem to usually be information based.For example, improvements in bank...

This paper examines, in the context of future EMU membership of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), the interaction between fiscal policy and the price level in different exchange rate regimes.The theoretical framework is based on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL).The...