A state monopoly in schooling followed the collapse of communism in Central Europe. The centrally planned system was abandoned. Systems comparable with educational voucher scheme, also known as school choice system, were introduced in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the early 1990s. The newly...

Mismeasurement of inflation is likely to be more severe in a transition economy than in a more stable environment. Reasonable estimates of the size of the inflationary bias in the Czech Republic suggest that conventionally reported declines in real output and living standards during the...

The curse of natural resources detected in numerous cross-country growth regressions isquestioned. Although natural resource dependence is associated with slow economic growth, there is no evidence that natural resource abundance per se is negatively related to growth. Thus, the supposed link...

Mismeasurement of inflation is likely to be more severe in a transition economy than in a more stable environment. Comparisons of self-reported changes in economic welfare with changes in incomes suggest that official Romanian inflation measures may be overstated by between 100 and 300 percent...

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...

One of the most enduring debates in economics is whether financial development causes economic growth or whether it is a consequence of increased economic activity. Little research into this question, however, has used a true causality framework. This paper fills this lacuna by using...

We develop a novel estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self- employed underreport income whereas wage and salary...

The current literature shows a significant negative impact of terrorism on countries' economies. We explore this relationship in more detail. Using an unbalanced panel of over 160 countries for up to 25 years and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) we show a decrease in FDI as a consequence of...

A fundamental question in economics since the 1930s has been whether an administrative price system could simulate the results of perfect competition even without a true market for the means of production. The theoretical possibility of such a system has been known since the introduction of...

Results of numerous cross-country growth regressions have been found to be sensitive to specification, time period or sample coverage. Several authors have observed that results may depend on the source and data collection methods for right-hand side variables. In this paper we suggest that a...