Parents who experience poverty and who want to provide their children with an escape route can be expected to encourage and support their progeny’s education. The evidence that Roma parents behave differently is unsettling. In this paper we test empirically an explanation for that behavior....

After the communist regimes collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, they were replaced (at least initially) by relatively wide-ranging democracy. Measured by the indices of political freedom and civil liberties published by the Freedom House (see the Technical Annex for...

Parametric regression models are often not flexible enough to capture the true relationships as they tend to rely on arbitrary identification assumptions. Using the UK Labor Force Survey, the authors estimate the causal effect of national minimum wage (NMW) increases on the probability of job...

The UK national minimum wage (NMW) is age-specific with the most important threshold at the age of 22 (lowered to 21 from 2010 onwards) when workers become eligible for the adult rate. The authors estimate the impact of this threshold on employment by means of a regression discontinuity...

In this paper, I analyze the development of inter-regional mobility in the Czech Republic during the transition from central planning to a market economy. I show that the intensity of migration is low and even has fallen during the transition regional disparities in unemployment rates and...

In the programming period 2007-2013, the European Structural and Investment Fund (ESIF) invested €237 million in Slovak hospitals. We investigate whether this injection of additional funds has improved the quality of healthcare in the targeted hospitals. As a measure of quality, we use the...