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...

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...

We use a spatial competition based model in a two-stage game setup to assess whether equilibrium in exchange rates among the leading currencies is attainable. We show that a stable equilibrium can be reached in the case of two leading currencies, but not in the case of three. In our model,...

The present paper uses a survey of 1062 Czechs and 524 Slovaks to ask why people evade taxes. We maintain that the Czech and Slovak Republics are “twins” separated at birth and that divergences between these countries since their separation in 1992 can explain divergences in their rates of...

We use a dataset of 1062 individuals from the Czech Republic to forecast the evolution of tax evasion in that country. We ask each respondent how intensely (never, sometimes, often) he evaded taxes in 1995, 1999, and 2000, to calculate probabilities the average individual will move between these...

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...

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 link between informed trading and the bid-ask spread has been the focus of abundant literature and some authors feared that a large amount of informed trading might lead to shutdown of markets. We explore this issue using data from the Czech Republic. Our estimates confirm that the share of...

We analyze the effects of ownership type and concentration on performance of a population of firms in a model large-scale privatization economy. Using specifications based on first-differences and unique instrumental variables, we find that few types of private ownership improve dynamic...

IV estimates of the link between profits and investment in the Czech Republic find a complex relationship. While firms may occasionally be credit rationed or face soft budget constraints, investments generally flow to industries with the greatest profit potential or need for recapitalization