Hungary has been a front-runner in the transition to capitalism. It has also experienced exceptionally radical changes in employment and relative wages. One main feature of these changes is an enormous increase in the returns to skill. This paper argues that it is instructive to divide the...

Using a large and unexpected public wage increase in Hungary which changed the public wage premium in 2002 from -17 to +7.5 percent from one month to the next, I study wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector. I proxy the exposure of corporate workers to the public sector with the...

Inflation in Central and East European countries varied considerably over the transition phase, and econometric relationships between prices, money, wages and exchange rates are said to have been unstable during this period. In order to shed some light on the issue, this paper analyses some...