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 paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

This paper evaluates the gender wage gap among wage workers along the wage distribution in Georgia between 2004 and 2011, based on the recentered influence function (RIF) decomposition approach developed in Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009). We find that the gender wage gap decreases along the...

This inquiry argues that the successful completion of the transition process in the post-Soviet economies is constrained by the prevailing social structure and low levels of technological progress, both of which require institutional reforms aimed at increasing growth in national income,...

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...