This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and divergence in the nature and pace of political and economic reform and transformation after 1989. We put together a unique data set on dissident activities for the 27 former centrally...

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have displayed widely disparate trade performance since the beginning of the transition. The Czech Republic and Hungary have had some success moving into the production and export of more technologically-sophisticated, higher value-added goods, while...

In this paper we analyse job flows in five transition countries: Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Using comparable firm level data over the years 1993-1997, we find that in early transition job destruction dominates job creation, while the latter is picking up as the country...

In this paper we re-examine empirically the Structure-Conduct-Performance relationship between concentration and profitability using new data on Russia that allow us to overcome the endogeneity problem of market structure and expand on the traditional analysis in several ways. The analysis...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to living standards. I explore the possible implications of this key fact by surveying and adapting literature on growth and inequality. I focus especially on the long run and policy options.

In this paper, we use 1991-2005 panel data on the unemployed, vacancies, inflow into unemployment, and outflow from unemployment in five former communist economies and in the western part of Germany (a benchmark western economy) to examine the evolution of unemployment together with that of...

Barter in Russia can be explained by firms' liquidity constraint: it is strongly correlated with financial tightness. However, a microeconomic analysis reveals that the rationale behind this liquidity constraint is different according to the firm situation. For firms in a good economic...

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to assess factors affecting the duration of unemployment in Russia. We examine four types of marginalised labour force participants, according to ILO guidelines and survey responses, and we estimate duration models for each type. It turns out that the...