Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Introduction / Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger -- Living large : introduction -- Tuzex and the hustler : living it up in Czechoslovakia / Paulina Bren -- Utopia gone terribly right : plutonium's "gated communities" in the Soviet Union and the United States /...

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...