Recent Eurobarometer survey data are used to document and explain the stock of social capital in 28 European countries. Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe – measured by civic participation and access to social networks – lags behind that in Western European countries. Using...

This paper utilizes a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in their recent national elections to investigate the impact of institutional, political and economic characteristics on migrants’ voting behavior. The political preferences of migrants are strikingly different...

This paper explores interactions between growth, economic liberalization and democratization during transition. The results can be summarized as follows: (1) Liberalization has a strong positive effect on growth during transition (also when controlling for endogeneity of liberalization in...

Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union. However, a large number of official languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. We address the merits of multilingualism and formulate an...

The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries. In line with this enlargement, the list of official EU languages has grown from 11 to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries’ official languages by providing translations for documents and...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese...

Does migration facilitate regional adjustment to idiosyncratic shocks? The evidence from post-communist economies indicates that the efficacy of migration in reducing inter-regional unemployment and wage differentials has in fact been rather low. High wages appear to encourage, and, similarly,...

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

In this paper, I analyze the development of inter-regional mobility in the Czech Republic during the transition from central planning to a market economy. I show that the intensity of migration is low and even has fallen during the transition regional disparities in unemployment rates and...

We argue that econometric analyses based on transition countries’ data can be vulnerable to structural breaks across time and/or countries. We demonstrate this argument by identifying structural breaks in growth regressions estimated with data for 25 countries and 12 years. Our method allows...