Does democracy increase economic growth? Previous literature tends to find a positive effect but does also suffer from possible endogeneity problems: democratization is typically not random and might be affected by factors that also have an impact on economic growth. This paper narrows down the...

This paper evaluates gender wage differentials in Georgia between 2000 and 2004. Using ordinary least squares, we find that the gender wage gap in Georgia is substantially higher than in other transition countries. Correcting for sample selection bias using the Heckman approach further increases...

his paper examines an important anomaly in the internal migration history of the former Soviet Union (FSU). While many cities were closed in the sense of explicitly limiting growth of city population from migration, it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of these controls. We analyze a...

This paper examines the political economy of Russian city growth. For the 1980s, we model the growth of 168 Russian cities located in 71 Russian provinces (oblast level). We examine the role of both general socio-economic characteristics and specific state controls. Our goal is to understand the...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

After Comeconís dissolution, agentsí lack of experience in product di§erentiation could have triggered demand-side mechanisms affecting trade flows between the two sides of the fallen Iron Curtain. Specifically, producers from a block of countries might have faced a quality perception gap...

In this paper, we examine the performance of the market mechanism by focusing on whether no one, in the "long-run", can be left behind with technological innovation in the economy. We show that the market mechanism with technological innovation unavoidably leaves some individuals behind. We...

The desirability of WTO membership for China depends on whether its economic successes have been the result of its discovery of new institutional forms (e.g. dual track pricing, SOE contracts, and fiscal contracts) that are optimal for China''s particular economic circumstances, or have been the...

Following the financial crisis of 2008, transition countries - the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union - experienced an increase in female labor force participation rates and a decrease in male labor force participation rates, in part because male-dominated...