We explore the pace of increase in returns to schooling during the transition from planning to market over time across a number of Central and Eastern European countries, Russia, and China. We use metadata from 33 studies of 10 transition economies covering a period from 1975 through 2002. Our...

This paper uncovers evidence on the distribution of wages in Belarus in the second half of the 1990s. The returns to education and work experience are high and stable, which is atypical for a transition country. This might be due to the pervasive role of the state in fixing wages in the dominant...

This paper seeks to document and analyze changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...

This paper examines the contraction in the gender wage gap in Georgia between 2004 and 2011. Behind the continuous decline at the mean lies a change in the shape of the gender wage gap across the wage distribution before and after the 2008 crisis. Before the crisis, the growth in state sector...

Social status and political connections may confer large economic benefits on an individual. Previous studies focused on China have examined the relationship between Communist Party membership and earnings and found a positive correlation. However, the correlation could be partly or totally...

The use of informal job search method is prevalent in many countries. There is, however, no consensus in the literature on whether it actually matters for wages, and if it does, what are the underlying mechanisms. We empirically examine these issues specifically for rural migrants in urban...

The goal of this paper is to examine the patterns and movements of the gender pay gaps in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and to place them in the context of advanced economies. We survey over 30 publications and conduct a meta-analysis of this literature. Gender pay gaps in the...

This paper estimates public-private sector wage differentials in two emerging market economies - Croatia and Serbia - between 2008 and 2011 in order to understand changes in the gap resulting from austerity measures undertaken by each sector. The paper focuses on counterfactual decompositions of...

In this paper we use the national samples from the European Structure of Earnings Survey (ESES) to analyze the evolution of the wage premium of firm- and industry-level agreements in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (the CE3) around the time of their accession to the EU. We find that...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but...