The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...

Transition has involved major job destruction and creation. This paper examines the skill content of these changes using a detailed three country firm survey. It shows that transition has exerted a strong bias against unskilled labour who have lost employment disproportionately. Moreover, job...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...

We analyze comprehensive manufacturing firm data to measure the contribution of inter-firm employment reallocation to aggregate productivity growth during the socialist and reform periods in six transition economies. Modifying a standard decomposition technique to better reflect the role of firm...

We analyze the impact of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially stateowned manufacturing firms in four economies. Controlling for firm and industry-year fixed effects and employing a wide variety of measurement approaches, we...

We analyze comprehensive manufacturing firm data to measure the contribution of interfirm employment reallocation to aggregate productivity growth during the socialist and reform periods in six transition economies. Modifying a standard decomposition technique to better reflect the role of firm...