This paper provides a comprehensive account of the regulations governing the systems of unemployment support and social assistance in post-transition Poland. To provide a solid foundation for a discussion of these issues, the paper extensively characterizes the Polish force in terms of the...

Post-communist labor markets provide an interesting laboratory since unemployment rates grew from zero to double digits and gender differences began to vary greatly across these countries. We provide the first systematic analysis of the determinants of the gender unemployment gap in the Czech...

The objective of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the consequences of worker displacement in France and the United States. I estimate wage losses of displaced workers in the two countries and examine the relative contribution of two important sources of post-displacement wage...

In this paper we examine the location determinants of the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Poland, at a regional level. Using survey data from an online questionnaire in February 2005 and a multinomial logit model incorporating the investor’s specific characteristics, we show...

This paper makes some selective comparisons of the empirical evidence relating to financial discipline and soft budget constraints in the enterprise sector in China and the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (CEEFSU). The paper finds that: (1) in both...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

There are two strands in the empirical literature on economic growth in transition economies. One focuses on the impact of reforms, while the other emphasizes sustainability issues and the growth prospects these economies face. The most common strategy, in the latter, has been to use...

In the three fast track, Central European transition countries, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, bank restructuring and privatization involved different approaches and met with a variety of outcomes. Hence, these experiences in otherwise similar transition economies provide important...

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

The paper exploits a large set of more than 8,000 firms for ten advanced transition countries in order to uncover the importance of different channels of technology transfer through FDI and its impact on productivity growth of local firms. In addition to direct effects, we also distinguish...