Using panel district level data from the Czech and Slovak Republic in the 1990s, we find that the exceptionally low unemployment rate in the Czech Republic as compared to Slovakia and the other CEE economies has been brought about principally by the following phenomena in the Czech Republic: (1)...

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it...

The paper tests three hypotheses about the causes of unemployment in the Central-East European transition economies and in a benchmark market economy (Western part of Germany). The first hypothesis (H1) is that unemployment is caused by inefficient matching. Hypothesis 2 (H2) is that...