East Germany, a unique socialist command economy prior to the 1990s, underwent rapid transition to a market-oriented economic system. This transition has been of intense interest given the environment of Eastern Germany vis-a-vis Western Germany, a setting different from most other transition...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

This paper examines an important anomaly in the internal migration history of the former Soviet Union (FSU). While many cities were closed in the sense of explicitly limiting growth of city population from migration, it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of these controls. We analyze a...

This paper utilizes the Soviet Interview Project (SIP) and the 1990 U.S. census to identify and to track a sample of Soviet émigrés. After examining basic descriptive statistics on income mobility, we specify and estimate earnings functions to examine the impact of a variety of explanatory...

This paper examines the political economy of Russian city growth. For the 1980s, we model the growth of 168 Russian cities located in 71 Russian provinces (oblast level). We examine the role of both general socio-economic characteristics and specific state controls. Our goal is to understand the...

We analyze the early U.S. economic achievement of former Soviet citizens entering the United States during the period 1979 through 1985. Using the Soviet Interview project (SIP) data, we identify components of human capital acquired in the former Soviet Union (FSU), relating these to labor force...