We use rich firm-level data and national input-output tables from 17 countries over the 2002-2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). We document that backward...

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...

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...

A series of studies confirm results presented Filer and Hanousek (2000) suggesting that mismeasurement of inflation during the transition is a serious problem, on the same relative order of magnitude (and greater in absolute magnitude) as in advanced market economies. Overall, inflation has been...

The rapidly changing environment of the transition may create special problems for calculation of index numbers that require a fixed basket of goods and retail outlets. Using referent-level data we find that fixed- weight Laspeyres index on average overstated cost of living increases by...

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...

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...

The rapidly changing environment of the transition may create special problems for calculation of index numbers that require a fixed basket of goods and outlets. Using referent-level data we find that using a fixed-weight Laspeyres Index may overstate inflation rates by approximately 5 per cent...

Substantial understatement of the degree of quality improvement during transition, and, therefore, a substantial overstatement of inflation rates has resulted in a serious downward bias in estimates of the rate of growth of post-communist economies. The move to free markets has apparently...

This paper studies bank-failure models in the context of transition economies. In order to capture the default risk of banks, data on the structure of retail deposit rates is used to improve the prognostic quality of bank-failure prediction. The Czech bank crisis of 1994?1996, during which 14...