Most countries commonly classified as 'in transition' are st ill recognisably different from other countries with a similar income per capita in some respects: a larger share of their work force is in industry, they use more energy, they have a more extensive infrastructure and invest more in...

Recently, Blanchard and Kremer (BK) argued that disorganization has led to the output decline in the former Soviet Union. In this paper we introduce liquidity and credit constraints into the BK model and show how these problems can alleviate the hold-up problem. We argue further that barter...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region's resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

The transition paths from plan to market have varied markedly across countries. Central and Eastern European and the Baltic countries, which opted for a fast and profound transformation of their institutions including business climates, rapidly narrowed the productivity gap with advanced...

ARCH modelling framework of Engle (1982) and its GARCH generalization of Bollerslev (1986) gave a huge impetus to econometric model building in the field of financial time series with time-varying variance. The main idea of the models was to describe the most typical features of capital markets...