Two hypotheses about the determinants of Russian intergovernmental grants are tested empirically. According to first hypothesis, federal transfers to regions correlate with recent voting behavior of regional electorates. Second hypothesis states that transfers are higher in regions with...

This paper provides the quantitative estimate of the potential growth bonus for CIS countries, and in particular EU's Easter Neighbours, that can be a result of deeper institutional harmonisation with the EU. Econometric investigation involving instrumental variable, simultaneous equation and...

CASE-Center for Social and Economic Research prepared an Ukrainian translation of Oleh Havrylyshyn's publication "A quarter century of economic reforms in Ukraine: too late, too slow, too little". The first aim of this paper is to describe the main developments in the Ukrainian economy since its...

One of the intriguing questions of our times is the importance of the centralization and nationalization campaigns of the 2nd and 3rd Orbán-government carried out since 2010. In an earlier working paper - Mihalyi (2015) - I demonstrated that similar policy steps were occasionally taken in other...

Agriculture plays an important part in Kazakhstan´s self-image, and continues to be a significant economic sector, employing about a third of the workforce. In the two decades since independence, agriculture has experienced dramatic swings in performance and in public policy. During the 1990s...

Hungary is one of the worst-hit countries of the current financial crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. The deteriorating economic performance of the country is, however, not a recent phenomenon. A relatively high ratio of redistribution, a high and persistent public deficit and accelerated...

We study the effects of homeownership on labor force participation and unemployment. We exploit housing privatization and restitution after the fall of communism as a source exogenous assignment of homeowner/renter status, using a unique dataset from the city of Brno, Czech Republic. We do not...

This paper studies the labor market consequences of ethnic politics in African democracies. We combine geo-referenced data from 15 countries, 32 parliamentary elections, 62 political parties, 243 ethnic groups, 2,200 electoral constituencies, and 400,000 individuals. We implement a regression...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Political networks are an important feature of the political and economic landscape of countries. Despite their ubiquity and significance, information on such networks has proven hard to collect due to a pervasive lack of transparency. However, with the advent of big data and artificial...