Media coverage of humanitarian crises is widely believed to influence charitable giving, yet this assertion has received little empirical scrutiny. Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to...

We present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidnce and a fiscal externality. We analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A first...

The purpose of this paper consists in assessing the extent of financial integration in European Union using the Feldstein-Horioka criterion. More precisely, we test the cross-correlation of savings and investment rates across European Union regions, using NUTS 2 data coming from Eurostat...

The paper examines the technological structure of the Japanese banking sector before the onset of the banking crisis and structural reforms of the 90s in order to shade light on the logic of the recent trend to consolidation in the industry. While diseconomies of scale are shown to be pervasive...

Economic reforms in China have brought rapid growth in nonagricultural employment in rural areas and a substantial shift in the structure of rural employment. These changes have led researchers to question the conventional view of rural China as a labor surplus economy with poorly functioning...

Using information contained in a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of Russian citizens, this research analyzes the determinants of unemployment duration during the early stages of economic transition. A competing-risks, discrete-time waiting model augmented to incorporate unobserved...

The paper argues that an economy's industry/technology structure is endogenously determined by the economy's endowment structure. For the convergence to occur, the government of an LDC should target the upgrading of endowment structure instead of the industry/technology structure in its...

This research addresses labor market transformation in Russia. It elaborates on the theory of job search and focuses on the following issues: (1) evaluation of the re-employment probabilities (hazard rates) for different socio-economic groups; and (2) estimation of wage offer distribution for...

The relationship between ownership structure and corporate performance has been the subject of intense research in both transition and market economies. The Czech Republic's mass-privatization program provides an unique opportunity to investigate this relationship. It changed the ownership of...

We study China's township-village enterprises (TVES) from an organizational perspective with a focus on governance. Unlike most previous studies, we interpret the firm boundaries of TVEs at the community level rather than the enterprise level. From this perspective, we analyze the central role...