After the start of transition, in Central European Economies the restructuring process of large state enterprizes was accompanied by high unemployment all through the '90s. Social policy expenditures, particularly targeted to the non-employed, grew faster than expected due to the need to finance...

We analyze the effect of state visits by the Catholic pope on human rights in the host country to understand how a small theocracy like the Vatican can exert disproportionate political influence in international politics. Our theoretical model of the strategic interaction between the Catholic...

This study examines the repercussions of the 1979 Sandinista revolution on Nicaragua's economic growth trajectory. Drawing on the synthetic control method, it constructs an artificial counterpart to Nicaragua with the primary objective of estimating the counterfactual gross domestic product...

The case of the Belarusian economy has puzzled many academic scholars for years. Belarus has often been referred to as a transition outlier, given its relatively fast recovery in 1996 and spectacular growth prior to the global financial crisis without much transformation of its economy. Three...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

With the help of a peculiar institutional feature of early Romanian privatization, when a group of firms was explicitly banned to become private, we test which factors contributed to the selection of firms into long-term state ownership. We find that politicians sheltered large and inefficient...

This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of dissident activities in 27 former communist countries...

What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the features of consolidated autocracy. This study...

Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered 'intriguing' and 'puzzling' since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party - the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful impediment to market growth. Scholars have proposed...