This paper focuses on the effects of reforms and happiness in transition economies. previous literature suggest that religiousness insures happiness against individual stressful life events, such as unemployment, disability, or marital separation. I estimate an econometric model to study if...

In our analysis, we examine the convergence of all recent ten European Union (EU) members to EU standards. Novel features of the paper include more complete measures of convergence, in particular fiscal convergence; a broader examination of inflation convergence with respect to the Maastricht...

Recent work on the following three aspects of labor market transition in the Czech Republic is presented: (i) reallocating workers and jobs from post-communist firms to newly started enterprises, (ii) providing incentives for human capital investment decisions, and (iii) coming to terms with...

This book provides a detailed analysis of the transition experience of Czech workers and students. The first chapter starts with a cross-sectional comparative study of the transition from communist to market wage structures and returns to human capital. The second chapter provides insight into...

This study explores the characteristics of corporate charitable behavior in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is the first quantitative study for transition economies, analyzing data from two surveys for 577 and 162 firms over three (2001-2003) and five (2001-2005) years in the Czech Republic,...

Using surveys of the Czech Republic taken in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 we measure how the percentage of tax evaders evolved from 1995 until 2006. We find that at first evasion rose, leveled off, and then fell along a quadratic path, suggesting the existence of what we call an evasional Kuznets...

This paper argues that even temporary barriers to entry present at the very beginning of transition may lead to permanent extortion development. Entry restrictions, if binding, lead to excess profits, which create an incentive to extort. The emergence of extortionists reduces the expected profit...

Mismeasurement of inflation is likely to be more severe in a transition economy than in a more stable environment. Reasonable estimates of the size of the inflationary bias in the Czech Republic suggest that conventionally reported declines in real output and living standards during the...

Income and consumption inequality increased in all transition economies, albeit to very different levels. Existing findings suggest that countries that were slow to undertake promarket reforms experienced the largest increase in inequality, with the notable exception of Belarus, one of the least...

We extend the scarce evidence on labor supply in post-transition countries by estimating the wage elasticity of labor force participation in the Czech Republic. Using the household income survey data of 2002, we find that a one-percent rise in the gross wage increases the probability of working...