We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

This study examines the impact of Poland's trade liberalization 1994-2001 on the industry wage structure. The liberalization was undertaken in preparation for Poland's accession to the European Union and was more pronounced in industries with larger shares of unskilled labor. Our analysis...

In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in...

The Coase theorem implies that, in a world of positive transaction costs, any of a number of strategies, including judicially enforced private contracts, judicially enforced laws, or even government regulation, may be the cheapest way to bring about efficient resource allocation. Unfortunately,...

We ask whether Poland is at risk of the boom-bust problem that has afflicted economies around the time of euro adoption. Our answer, inevitably, is mixed. On the one hand the fact that Poland is an outlier, credit-growth wise, accentuates the danger of a boom if one believes in mean reversion....

We document evidence consistent with retail day traders in the Forex market attributing random success to their own skill and, as a consequence, increasing risk taking. Although past performance does not predict future success for these traders, traders increase trade sizes, trade size...

Fiscal deficits, elevated debt-to-GDP ratios, and high inflation rates suggest hyperinflation could have potentially emerged in many European countries after World War I. We demonstrate that economic policy uncertainty was instrumental in pushing a subset of European countries into...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in...

In this paper I examine the evolution of labor relations institutions during the initial phase of marketization in Poland, Hungary. and Czechoslovakia and develop a model of changing support for reforms during the transition to a market economy. I find surprising stability in labor institutions...

This paper examines the inflation targeting experience in three transition countries: the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. While the examined countries have missed inflation targets often by a large margin, they nevertheless progressed well with disinflation. A key lesson from the experience...