Recent work on the following three aspects of labor market transition in the Czech Republic is presented: (i) reallocating workers and jobs from post-communist firms to newly started enterprises, (ii) providing incentives for human capital investment decisions, and (iii) coming to terms with...

The system of Unemployment Insurance (UI) financing in the US draws its funds from a payroll tax on employers and varies the tax rate according to the individual employer's layoff history. There exists extensive evidence on the effect of this so-called experience rated tax on layoff decisions....

The establishment of the EU-15 'single market' in 1993 brought about a high degree of synchronization of industry shocks, while substantial diversity existed in the development of country-level financial markets. We compare within-industry growth rates of similar 'single-market' firms facing...

This paper examines the gender gaps in employment and wages among top- and lowerlevel managerial employees in a recent sample of Czech firms. Unlike the existing analyses of managerial gender pay gaps, we acknowledge the adverse consequences of the low and uneven representation of women for the...

This paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected...

One’s position in an alphabetically sorted list may be important in determining access to rationed goods or oversubscribed public services. Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we investigate the importance of the position in the alphabet of the last name initial of Czech students for their...

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff---admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating from secondary schools and applying to...

Czech returns to education are estimated using 2002 data on hourly wages of salaried employees. The return to an additional year of schooling is close to 10% – that is relatively high given the level of economic development and average schooling level. Particularly large is the...

Transition countries hoping to join the European Union are in the process of introducing western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. The efficacy of these policies depends on the relative size of the gap's elements they target; therefore, it is important to...