The paper discusses the development of non-wage benefits in the Czech economy during the transition from a planned to a market economy. It shows a slowly increasing importance of such instruments of attracting best employees as social insurance or subsidized goods and services. Following an...

An employer-based sample of over 660,000 Czech and 260,000 Slovak workers is used to estimate the benefits of education in 1995 to 1997. By 1997 education of all types had become substantially more highly rewarded in both countries than it was either under communism or in the early years of the...

The curse of natural resources detected in numerous cross-country growth regressions is questioned. 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...

We investigate how a firm's financial performance affects workplace safety. We provide empirical estimates of the relationship between a firm's financial condition and its investment in workplace safety using plant-level proxies for safety performance from OSHA records for thirteen large...

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...

It is claimed that many regulatory rules enforce inefficiencies in order to achieve the appearance of cost control. We assess the importance of these claims by measuring the effect of New York state's compulsory multiple contractor law on the cost of public construction in New York City....

This paper applies three different methods widely used in the literature to track changes in shadow economic activity in Georgia following a drastic tax reform in 2005. The first method is a currency demand approach based on macro level data. The second and third methods rely on micro data from...

We investigate how a firm's financial performance affects workplace safety. We provide empirical estimates of the relationship between a firm's financial condition and its investment in workplace safety using plant-level proxies for safety performance from OSHA records for thirteen large...