Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show...

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...

Political networks are an important feature of the political and economic landscape of countries. Despite their ubiquity and significance, information on such networks has proven hard to collect due to a pervasive lack of transparency. However, with the advent of big data and artificial...

Can autocracies and their associated institutions successfully implement economic policies that promote growth and investment? Can 'good economics' somehow offset the effects of 'bad' politics? Kazakhstan is a case where an autocratic regime has actively projected market-friendly policies and...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for morethan 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment, and restricting paydifferentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equalopportunities and treatment for...

With the extension of its competence for social policy legislation in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties, the EU has adopted a significantly new social dimension in the past ten years. According to the Copenhagen criteria, the CEEC candidate countries have to adopt the former via the acquis...

Although the development of a new private sector is generally considered crucial to economic transition, there has been rather little empirical research on the determinants of startup firm growth. This paper uses panel data techniques to analyze a survey of 297 new small enterprises in Romania...

This paper analyzes the migration behavior of ethnic groups in the former Soviet Un-ion (FSU) from 1989 to 1999. The two main migration movements have been return migration of ethnic groups to their titular nation and migration of all ethnic groups to the Russian Federation. Using factor...