This paper uses census and survey data to identify the wage earning ability and the selection of recent Romanian migrants and returnees. We construct measures of selection across skill groups and estimate the average and the skill-specific premium for migration and return for three typical...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to financial incentives and, in particular, it is an attempt to identify the causal impact of a wage loss on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector. Specifically, we exploit the unexpected wage cut in May 2010 that affected all...

Using the 2007 Encuesta Nacional de Immigración (ENI), we find that male migrants follow a similar labor and legal assimilation pattern in Spain regardless of their nationality (with Romanians faring worse in terms of legal status but better in terms of employment status at arrival). Among...

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of Pollution Abatement and Control Expenditure (PACE) at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a Multilevel Regression Model (MRM)....

We examine the effect of joining the European Union on individual life satisfaction in Bulgaria and Romania in the context of the 2007 EU enlargement. Although EU membership is among the most important events in Bulgaria and Romania's modern histories, there is no evidence on how it affected the...

We evaluate the presence of effects from joining one of four active labour market programs in Romania in the late 1990s compared to the no-program state. Using rich survey data and propensity score matching, we find that three programs (training and retraining, small business assistance, and...

This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and even turning down. The argument is made using a range of data sources and a range of measures and perspectives on inequality. The evolution of inequality is further examined...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

We investigate the distributional consequences of a corruption-fighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats for teachers and students. We find that the campaign was...

Many children grow up with parents working abroad. Economists are interested in the achievement and well-being of these "home alone" children to better understand the positive and negative aspects of migration in the sending countries. This paper examines the causal effects of parents' migration...