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...

In spite of ongoing dramatic changes in labor market structure, transitional economies display rather low worker flows across sectors and occupations. Such low mobility can be explained by low returns to job changes as well as by market segmentation in the allocation of job offers. We develop an...

Two key factors that have so far allowed fast growing economies of central and eastern Europe to cope with their external constraint have been I) the presence of relatively low unit labour costs and ii)the initial undervaluation of the exchange rate. The accession to the EU will inevitably...

In spite of the ongoing dramatic changes in the structure of employment, transitional economies display rather low mobility across sectors, occupations and firms of different ownership. We characterise this low mobility of central and eastern European labour markets by computing mobility...

Several lessons can be drawn from the natural experiments of central and eastern European countries with labour market policies. Two of them are particularly relevant also for OECD countries. First, it is not wise to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits when the length of unemployment...

The literature on the economics of transition has devoted little, if any, attention to labour supply. We show in this paper that, properly accounting for labour supply adjustments permit to understand some of the most puzzling features of transition, such as the output fall, the strikingly low...