We develop a novel estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self-employed underreport income whereas wage and salary...

A state monopoly in schooling followed the collapse of communism in Central Europe. The centrally planned system was abandoned. Systems comparable with educational voucher scheme, also known as school choice system, were introduced in the Czech Republic and Hungary in the early 1990s. The newly...

A fundamental question in economics since the 1930s has been whether an administrative price system could simulate the results of perfect competition even without a true market for the means of production. The theoretical possibility of such a system has been known since the introduction of...

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...

The rapidly changing environment of the transition may create special problems for calculation of index numbers that require a fixed basket of goods and outlets. Using referent-level data we find that using a fixed-weight Laspeyres Index may overstate inflation rates by approximately 5 percent a...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight...

Measured rates of growth in real per capita income differ drastically depending on the data source. This phenomenon occurs largely because data sets differ in whether and how they adjust for changes in relative prices across countries. Replication of several recent studies of growth determinants...

This paper investigates the possibility that newly-emerging equity markets in Central Europe exhibit semi-strong form efficiency such that no relationship exists between lagged values of changes in economic variables and changes in equity prices. We find that while there are connections between...

The geographic distance between a household and financial institutions may constitute a significant obstacle to achieving the benefits of modern financial institutions. We measure the impact of distance-related access to microcredits in Uzbekistan. Residents living closer to microfinance...

The geographic distance between a household and financial institutions may constitute a significant obstacle to achieving the benefits of modern financial institutions. We measure the impact of improved distance-related access to microcredits in Uzbekistan. Residents living closer to...