The authors use a retrospective survey of 9,608 individuals, aged 16 to 75, to monitor the effects of Estonia's economic transition on wages and employment. Estonia is an interesting case because of its early adoption of relatively free labor market policies. Estonia's transition led to rapid...

Socialism as practiced in Eastern Europe is characterized by massive income redistribution. This paper focuses on: (a) interfirm redistribution, consisting of taxing profitable firms in order to subsidize unprofitable ones; and (b) intrafirm redistribution, consisting of the compression of...

The purpose of this paper is to show that Yugoslav firms have also been subjected to massive, pervasive redistribution through a soft budget constraint. To quantify such redistribution, the authors focus particulary on the redistributive effects of holding financial assets and liabilities in an...

Reform of the labor market in the former Soviet Union (FSU) is essential to increase productivity. The transition of the FSU economies to a market economy must involve a massive displacement of workers, and will entail labor shortages for certain skills. A key challenge will be to reallocate...

Yugoslavia (including Slovenia) has been more market-oriented than the rest of Eastern Europe, with little or no planning and healthier development of product markets. Until recently, however, the labor market in Slovenia was subject to formidable constraints. But sweeping legislative changes...

The Slovenian transition represents a slow, but steady liberalization of constraints on competition. Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia over the period 1994-2001, the authors analyze how firm efficiency changed, in response to changing competitive...

The authors identify winners and losers in Slovenia's economic transition by tracing changes in returns to education, experience, and gender and changes in wage inequality from 1987 to 1991. They find the following. Relative wages and employment rose for the most educated and fell for the least...

Some assert that when efficiency requires cooperation, effectiveness is increased by an egalitarian pay structure resulting from workers'participation in decisionmaking about pay. But it can also be argued that equalizing pay reduces the morale of highly productive workers, and thus more than...

This paper investigates how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the quality of post-unemployment jobs. It takes advantage of a natural experiment introduced by a change in Slovenia's unemployment insurance law that substantially reduced the potential benefit duration....

Between 1990 and 1992 in Slovenia, recipients of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits tended to remain (formally) unemployed until their benefits expired, before taking a job. Institutional set-up suggests, and labor surveys show, that many of the recipients were actually working while...