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...

We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Croatia and Latvia since the collapse of communism in 1991 in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and other...

This paper focuses on the role of institutions in poverty alleviation, where both poverty and institutions are interpreted broadly. The broadening of the poverty notion is important at least from the policy perspective. Even if one were convinced that higher growth would reduce income poverty to...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the...

By how much does an increase in operating effectiveness of a public employment agency (PEA) and a reduction of unemployment benefits reduce unemployment? Using a recent labour market reform in Germany as background, we find that an enhanced effectiveness of the PEA explains about 20% of the...