In recent years, institutional and evolutionary economists have become increasingly aware that ideas play an important role in economic development. In the current literature, the problem is usually elaborated upon in purely theoretical terms. In the present paper it is argued that ideas are...

Re-licensing requirements for professionals that move across borders are widespread. In this paper, we measure the returns to an occupational license using novel data on Soviet trained physicians that immigrated to Israel. An immigrant re-training assignment rule used by the Israel Ministry of...

At the turn of the 18th century Saint-Simon und his disciples, the Saint-Simonists, developed ideas about centrally planned and directed humane societies. These ideas are still influential and are proposed by some as guiding principles for the development of an institutional structure for a...

Both Western and Soviet estimates of GNP growth in the USSR indicate that GNP per capita grew in every decade

Nach sechs Reformjahren unter Gorbatschow wurde nicht nur von der politischen Führung anerkannt, sondern auch von den Durchschnittsbürgern verstanden, daß die früher gehaßte kapitalistische Wirtschaft viel effektiver als das sozialistische Plansystem funktioniert. In diesen Jahren wurde...

The highest rates of growth of labor productivity in the Soviet Union were observed not in the 1930s (3% annually), but in the 1950s (6%). The TFP growth rates by decades increased from 0.6% annually in the 1930s to 2.8% in the 1950s and then fell monotonously becoming negative in the 1980s. The...