This paper compiles alternative estimates of underground economies in twenty five transition countries during the transition decade and finds a disturbing lack of convergence between them, calling into question the reliability of GDP figures (which in varying degrees now include non-transparent...

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...

This paper analyses the emergence of the informal economy in the environment characterised by non-competitive labour markets with wage bargaining. We develop a simple extension of the standard search model à la Pissarides (2000) with formal and informal sectors to show how a government’s...

This paper examines the moderation of inflation in three transition economies, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at the end of the 1990s. We argue that the institutions for the conduct of monetary policy in these countries were relatively weak and that monetary policy was unsupported by...

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...

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation. A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to living standards. I explore the possible implications of this key fact by surveying and adapting literature on growth and inequality. I focus especially on the long run and policy options.

Drawing on Baumol’s concepts of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship and relevant amendments, this thesis aims to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by developing a conceptual framework which allows operationalising the concepts for empirical assessment....

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competi- tive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low- productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral ?scal system into a regressive one. A...

Although the theoretical literature often uses lobbying and corruption synonymously, the empirical literature associates lobbying with the preferred mean for exerting influence in developed countries and corruption with the preferred one in developing countries. This paper challenges these...