We present a model of agents facing the uncertainty of two future forms of government who are able to insure against this uncertainty by hiding funds from taxation. In order to choose whether or not to hide funds from taxation, agents need to know policy choices that each government would make...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic, performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic, crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

In this paper we analyze how Western Balkans public finances adapted to the boom-bust cycle. Large capital inflows into emerging European economies during the mid-2000s resulted in rapid economic growth and convergence to EU income levels. This also resulted in improved fiscal positions of most...

The paper intends to enlighten the challenges of human resources development, faced by post conflict counties that are passing the transition phase from closed to open economies. The study has been developed through an extensive literature survey of Kosovo's organizations to determine the most...

In this paper we explore politico-economic determinants of health. We draw upon the unique natural experiment of post-communist transitions to show the effect on health (measured as life expectancy and cause-specific mortality) of the interaction between institutions for political (democratic...

Using cross-country regressions, we examine the relationship between “point-source” resource abundance and economic growth, quality of institutions, investment in human and physical capital, and social welfare (life expectancy and infant mortality) for all countries and for the economies in...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

In the past 20 years, the Slovenia has been praised as the richest former socialist country, having accomplished the advancement from borrower into donor status at the World Bank and having entered the European Monetary Union as the first country from former socialist block. In the due course of...

It has recently become customary to argue that Russian economic transformation since 1991 has failed because of bad policy advice and mistaken policy choices. Though Russia's performance leaves much to be desired, such criticisms are based on a failure to analyse the real choices available to...