This paper takes advantage of a recent policy experiment in Ukraine's secondary education system to study the effect of stricter requirements for proficiency in the state language on linguistic minority students' demand for, as well as opportunities to pursue, further studies at the university...

This paper summarizes the evolution of labor markets and labor market institutions and policies in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as of Central Asia over the last two decades. The main focus is on the evolution of labor market institutions, which are among candidate...

This paper presents and discusses new data on employment protection legislation (EPL) in the successor states of the former USSR - the CIS and Baltic states - over 25 years from 1985 to 2009. We use the OECD methodology (OECD EPL, version II) for assessing the strictness of national labor laws...

We take advantage of a natural experiment in the minimum wage setting in Russia to study the employment consequences of large hikes in the minimum wage. In September 2007, the Russian government raised the federal minimum wage from 1,100 to 2,300 Rubles and simultaneously gave the regions the...

This paper investigates whether and how various characteristics of CEOs and corporate boards are related to the severity of corporate governance problems within firms. The latter is proxied by private benefits of control, which we measure for dual class stock firms using the voting premium...

This paper focuses on the determinants of the labor market situation of young people in developed countries and the developing world, with a special emphasis on the role of vocational training and education policies. We highlight the role of demographic factors, economic growth and labor market...

This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data...

The paper presents the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), which is one of the most widely used household and labor force surveys in Eastern Europe. It is based on a statistically representative sample of the Ukrainian population aged between 15 and 72 years, comprising about 4,000...

This paper studies the impact of federal state shareholdings on the performance of Russian companies.It differs from most similar studies in two respects.Firstly, it focuses on mixed ownership companies rather than conventional state enterprises.Secondly, it distinguishes between several types...

The paper studies whether and how CEO turnover in Ukrainian firms is related to theirperformance. Based on a novel dataset covering Ukrainian joint stock companies in 2002-2006, the paper finds statistically significant negative association between the pastperformance of firms measured by return...