Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...

The transition from centrally planned to market economy involves a process of massive occupational change that has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper investigates this process using data from the 1995 Estonian Labour Force Survey. We find that between 35 and 50 percent of wage...

How valuable are the skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This Paper throws light on this question using unique data covering the years before and during transition (1986-98) for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners. We find that returns to a year of schooling increased by 75%...

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on capital and labour incomes in a life-cycle model of human capital investment, financial savings, and labour supply with heterogenous individuals. A dual income tax with a positive marginal tax rate on not only labour income but also capital income is...

We examine how globalization affects firms’ incentives to provide general worker training. We consider a three-stage game. In stage 1, firms invest in productivity-enhancing training. In stage 2, they can make wage offers for each others’ workers. Finally, Cournot competition takes place....

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each other’s trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product...

How does the relationship between earnings and schooling change with the introduction of comprehensive economic reform? This Paper uses a unique dataset (covering about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998) and a novel procedure to correct sample selection bias (based on DiNardo,...

We develop a model of human capital formation with endogenous labour supply and heterogeneous agents to explore the optimal level of education subsidies along with the optimal progressive schedule of the labour income tax and optimal capital income taxes. Subsidies on education ensure efficiency...