Starting July the 1st 1997, Bulgaria adopted a Currency Board (CB) monetary system. This paper aims at investigating if the adoption of the CB monetary system, which involves the cost of loosing monetary autonomy, has provided a relatively better (with respect to other CEEC) monetary integration...

This paper uses quantile regression techniques to analyze heterogeneous patterns of return to education across the conditional wage distribution in four transition countries. We correct for sample selection bias using a procedure suggested by Buchinsky (2001), which is based on a Newey (1991,...

Recent empirical research on efficiency gains for Russia from WTO membership concludes that service trade liberalization especially through allowing foreign suppliers to invest in Russian service industries promises the largest gains. This points to sizable efficiency deficits in the Russian...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...

What does it mean to be in the informal sector? Many characterizations have been used in the literature, for example, firms that are unregistered or employ a small workforce or firms/economic enterprises that do not have access to formal capital markets. But many people participate in both...

With fortuitously timed data - collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria - we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary...

Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...

Die Dissertationsarbeit hat zum Ziel, die Gültigkeit der Aussagen eines außenhandelstheoretischen Ansatzes der Neo-Heckscher-Ohlin-Modellklasse in der realen Welt zu überprüfen. Der gewählte Modellierungstyp erlaubt die Koexistenz internationalen intra- und inter-industriellen Handels. Da...

The purpose of this evaluation is to assess the contribution of the statistics multi-beneficiary programme to improvements in the performance of National Statistics Offices in the candidate countries relating to the production and dissemination of statistics in key areas (comparable with EU...