Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the North Caucasus is known as a politically unstable region and as a melting pot for terrorism and all kinds of criminal activity, reaching from drugtrafficking and illegal arms trade to hijacking and extortion. Furthermore, the North Caucasus is one of...

The paper emphasizes the transition in Russia and the role institutions played before and during the process. In Russia, a big bang approach was applied. That is to say, transition was conducted all of a sudden, omitting important underlying reforms. This practice should function as a shock...

The Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, are very successful in transformation. From 1991 to 2015 they regained independence and transformed their economies from socialist central planning into functioning mar-ket economies, joined the EU in 2004 and became member of the Euro zone....

The objective of this paper is to assess whether the level of unionization and the rigidity of the exchange rate affected wages and monetary policy in SEE and CIS during the ongoing economic crisis. Towards that end, a New Keynesian model with price and wage rigidities is used. The model is...

The share of single mothers is higher in East Germany than in West Germany. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we examine two transmission channels leading to single motherhood, namely out-of-partnership births and separations of couples with minor children. Women in East Germany...

Using data from 2000 to 2007, we investigate the effect of bank concentration on the entrepreneurial initiative in the Central and Eastern European transition countries for eight industrial sectors. We set up a simple structural model bywhich we test the relationship between banking market...

Objectives: This paper aims to examine the transition process from the development and state of entrepreneurship in 15 former European socialist countries during 2006-2012. Our focus here is not on the full but on just one dimension of transition, entrepreneurship. While it is surely the case...

Along with political and economic changes, the fall of the socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union brought about fundamental institutional reforms. Several studies have examined the causes of the increasing unhappiness which accompanied the transition process,...

Employment protection legislation aims to shield employees against unfair dismissal and earning reductions at the time of job loss. Theory suggests that employment protection stabilizes employment over cyclical upturns and downturns without necessarily increasing general unemployment. However,...

We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...