Financial markets provide imperfect insurance of labor income risk. However, workers can partly insure against labor market risk by commuting to adjacent regions. Since commuters own wage claims to output produced in adjacent regions, the business cycle in the neighborhood becomes a relevant...

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

Some ten years ago, Michael Dooley (Dooley, 1997; Dooley, 2000) put forwardan insurance model of currency crises, which after some modifications gives a goodtheoretical basis for explanation of the overall dynamics of the post communist transformationand diversity across countries and periods. The...

Unlike in many other transition countries, where the gender pay gap has remained stable while female employment rates have reduced, in the case of Belarus women activity rate has been practically unchanged despite an increase in the gender pay gap. This paper investigates why this is the case by...

The paper analyzes the incidence, the severity and the determinants of household poverty inUkraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measurepoverty using income and consumption and contrast the effects of various poverty lines...

We estimate monetary policy rules for six central and eastern European countries (CEEC) bytaking changes in the policy settings explicitly into account. Distinguishing rather fixed andmore flexible exchange rate arrangements we find that for most countries exchange ratesplayed an important role...

Using the RLMS, this paper re-examines the nature of the gender wage gap in Russia between1994 and 1998 taking into account the pervasiveness of Russia’s non-payment institutions. Investigatingdiscrimination ‘bands’ at different sections of the income distribution and for various important...

The ratios of public debt as a share of GDP of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico were 12 percentagepoints higher on average during the period 1996-2005 than in the period 1990-1995. CostaRica's debt ratio remained stable but at a high level near 50 percent. Is there reason to beconcerned for the...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The resultsshow that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spendingdecentralization, and the electoral cycle can...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...