In this paper, we use 1991-2005 panel data on the unemployed, vacancies, inflow intounemployment, and outflow from unemployment in five former communist economies and inthe western part of Germany (a benchmark western economy) to examine the evolution ofunemployment together with that of inflows...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well...

We study the effect of exposure to communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist planning, on preferences for family supports, which we refer to as 'informal family insurance'. We exploit both cross-country and cohort variation in EC in a large sample of Central and Eastern...

The paper looks at the persistence of egalitarian norms in post-Communist societies by focusing on the former members of the Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia and their children. Using the individual-level survey data, we show that there are striking differences...

Using data for 22 economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we find evidence that having studied under communism is relatively penalized in the economies of the late 2000s. This evidence, however, is limited to males and to primary and secondary education, and holds for eight CEE economies but...

Does providing nontransferable months of parental leave earmarked to fathers, as mandated by the European Union to its member countries since 2019, increase their participation? To answer that question, the authors investigate the consequences of a 2015 French reform that earmarked up to 12...

Our paper seeks to gain insights on the effect of labor market institutions on the evolution of overeducation (job competition), unemployment inequalities and job instability during the polarization process of the labor market fostered by the diffusion of novel technologies. Based on micro data,...

This paper examines the determinants of the choice of the major when the length of studies is uncertain, by using a framework in which students entering post-secondary education are assumed to anticipate their future earnings. For that purpose, we use French data coming from the 1992 and 1998...