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 look at the differences in regional unemployment rates in six major transition countries and their persistence over time. We analyse the role various adjustment mechanisms play. While movement out of the labour force seems to be one consequence in many regions with high relative unemployment,...

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper uses household economic...

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of employment determination in four transition economies as they move from central planning to a market economy in the early 1990s. We use firm level panel data sets from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to estimate dynamic...

We examine the earnings determinants of the self-employed and wage earners in Hungary in the mid-1990's, taking into account two forms of selection: selection into working or nonworking for every individual in our sample and selection into self-employment or wageearning jobs for workers only....

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...

This paper estimates a tri-variate VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model to examine linkages between the stock markets of three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and both the UK and Russia. The adopted framework allows to analyse...

This study tests FDI technology spillover models with the assumption that learning takes time against wage bargaining models by estimating the wage-premium of a foreign takeover. The technology spillover theory predicts a larger wage growth in firms taken over by foreign investors than in local...

This paper uses a Markov regime-switching model to assess the vulnerability of a series of Central and Eastern European countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic) and two CIS countries (i.e., Russia and Ukraine) during the period 19932004. For the new EU member states in Central...

In January 2001 the Hungarian government increased the minimum wage from Ft 25,500 to Ft 40,000. One year later the wage floor rose further to Ft 50,000. The paper looks at the short-run impact of the first hike on small-firm employment and flows between employment and unemployment. It finds...