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...

Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries is approaching that of firms in advanced economies. We examine the extent of this convergence in the Czech Republic and Russia, economies that represent alternative models of implementing development policies,...

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all...

One potential impact of the looming EU accession of Central European economies is unemployment hysteresis working through long-term unemployment (LTU). In this paper, we explore the mechanisms of LTU by providing a detailed description of the recent rise in Czech LTU following the recession of...

A state monopoly in schooling followed the collapse of communism in Central Europe. The centrally planned system was abandoned. Systems comparable with educational voucher scheme, also known as school choice system, were introduced in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the early 1990s. The newly...

In an era of rapid technological change, information exchange, and emergence of knowledge-intensive industries it is critical to be able to identify the future skill needs of the labour market. Growing unemployment in EU member states and pre-accession countries in Eastern Europe combined with...

Studying the transition means analyzing the interactions between institutions and structural change, a process we still know very little about. In this paper we show that the transition process has been very different in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and those of Central and...

This paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected...