Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...

This paper summarises the key findings of a recent study on the impact of Eastern Enlargement of the European Union (EU) on labour markets in the current Member States. The study focuses on three main channels, along which enlargement may affect labour markets in the EU, namely i) trade, ii)...

Using the currency demand and DYMIMIC approaches estimates are presented about the size of the shadow economy in 22 Transition and 21 OECD countries. Over 2001/2002 in 21 OECD countries is the average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) 16.7% of "official" GDP and of 22...

The transition process has had different distributional impacts across different interest groups and countries. These have led to differences in the support for transition. In this paper, we study support attitudes for both the economic and political transition using data from the New Barometer...

While China shared many systemic, initial conditions with the transition economies of Central-East Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), it had a more agricultural economy and a more stable political-economic system than many CEE and CIS countries. Unlike most of the CEE...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic states - over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor laws...

Male suicide rates in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic countries increased substantially in the early 1990s and are now the highest in the world. To what extent is this suicide epidemic explained by the macroeconomic instability experienced by these countries in that period? Fixed effects...

Average education of new immigrants from the East European countries and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel declined during the last ten years. I present a simple two-period model of migration with uncertainty about future conditions in both countries and estimate a reduced form, using data...

This paper employed a widely accepted theoretical concept, the "theory of migrant networks" to look at the recent immigration and absorption experience of ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in Germany. Consistent with network theory, the social background...

Using uncertainty about the future returns to migration, the option value theory of migration can explain low migration rates in spite of huge wage differences. This paper presents the theory in a simple two-period framework and uses ethnic Germans in the CIS to find empirical support for it....