The German economy is not only affected by unification of Germany but by a significant influx of immigrants from abroad and huge migration from East to West Germany around the date of unification. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) allows one to disentangle those effects by...

The 1997 collapse of the Albanian economy caused by the collapse of economy-widePonzi schemes contrasts sharply to itssuccess status as a post-socialist transition country in the years 1992-1996. Inthis paper, an attempt is made to explain this'Albanian Paradox'. The specific Albanian conditions...

This paper focuses on ignored issues regarding the impact of trade reforms in transition economies. These economies are primarily characterized by a low quality of their products, large depreciations of their currencies, and a high degree of government intervention in economic activity. These...

Institutions are strikingly absent from most economic theory, certainly from growth theory.In standard theory it is simply assumed that the needed institutional environment is there,within which economic agents can make their optimizing decisions. At the same time, indescriptive growth studies,...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

A recent literature has emerged providing compelling evidence that a major shift in the organization of the developed economies has been taking place: away from what has been characterized as the managed economy towards the entrepreneurial economy. In particular, the empirical evidence provides...