We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989-90. The results, based on micro data from the 1985-92 Household Budget Surveys, indicate that overall income inequality increased during the initial...

This paper documents that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially during the economic transition in Poland. One surprising result is that earnings inequality increased markedly in both the private and public sectors, indicating that even state-owned enterprises in Poland moved...