This paper exploits the rapid rise in self-employment rates in post-communist Eastern Europe as a valuable "quasi-experiment" for understanding the sources of entrepreneurship. A relative demand-supply model and an individual sectoral choice model are used to analyze a 1993 survey of 27,000...

The paper looks at how the distribution of jobs by complexity and firms' willingness to hire low educated labor for jobs of different complexity contribute to unskilled employment in Norway, Italy and Hungary. In search of how unqualified workers can attend complex jobs, it compares their...

Policies supporting international student mobility prepare young people for the challenges of global and multicultural environments. However, disadvantaged students have lower participation rates in mobility schemes, and hence benefit less from their positive impacts on career progression....

This paper uses quantile regression techniques to analyze heterogeneous patterns of return to education across the conditional wage distribution in four transition countries. We correct for sample selection bias using a procedure suggested by Buchinsky (2001), which is based on a Newey (1991,...

Starting July the 1st 1997, Bulgaria adopted a Currency Board (CB) monetary system. This paper aims at investigating if the adoption of the CB monetary system, which involves the cost of loosing monetary autonomy, has provided a relatively better (with respect to other CEEC) monetary integration...

In this paper we document and analyse gross 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...

This paper examines the employment effects of a large burst of immigration - the politically-driven exodus of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria into Turkey in 1989. In some locations, the rise in the labor force due to this inflow of repatriates was 5 to 10 percent. A key feature of our context is the...

With fortuitously timed data - collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria - we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary...

What does it mean to be in the informal sector? Many characterizations have been used in the literature, for example, firms that are unregistered or employ a small workforce or firms/economic enterprises that do not have access to formal capital markets. But many people participate in both...