The rapid journey from central planning to EU (euro area) membership stress-tested the social learning processes of the Former Transition Economies (FTEs). The desire for a higher standard of living, to be anchored to the West, and to enter the EU, spurred major reform waves and led to the very...

Although small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent more than 90% of all enterprises and play an important role in employment generation, they lack access to affordable formal finance. Conventionally, market failures and information imperfections are seen as majorcauses of this...

Data from nine transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe are used to examine the role of computer adoption for returns to education. As in western economies, computers are adopted most heavily by young, educated, English-speaking workers with the best access to local telecommunications...

We examine the case of the Czech Republic, which has been frequently cited as one of the most successful cases of transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Despite the costs related to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in late 1992 and 1993, the immediate consequences were quickly...

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

In this paper we document and analyse gross job flows in five transition countries, Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Using comparable firm level data over the years 1993- 1997, we find that in early transition job destruction dominates job creation, while the latter is picking up...

It has been shown that higher levels of subjective well-being lead to greater work productivity, better physical health and enhanced social skills. Because of these positive externalities, policymakers across the world should be interested in attracting and retaining happy and life-satisfied...

This paper examines the contraction in the gender wage gap in Georgia between 2004 and 2011. Behind the continuous decline at the mean lies a change in the shape of the gender wage gap across the wage distribution before and after the 2008 crisis. Before the crisis, the growth in state sector...

This paper investigates the detfirminants of firm survival and growth in Slovenia, a country in transition from a plan to a market economy. firm growth (measured using employment) and firm survival (the probability of remaining in activity) are estimated using firm level data for the years 1994...

We apply Suttons (1998) framework to compare the firm size distribution of two transition economies, Slovenia and Bulgaria with that of a market economy, Belgium. We find that there exists a minimum degree of inequality in the size of firms. In addition firm size inequality levels in Belgium and...