n this paper we take a simulation approach towards household budgets survey, analysing the impact of changes in labour market status of household members on the ability of this household to service the mortgage payments. Using the current status as benchmark, we performed simulations using...

It is often raised that enterprises in transition countries are cursed with credit constraints and insufficient capital. Regardless of whether this belief holds for the whole of the economy, the Agency Theory provides a useful both theoretical and empirical framework helping to verify the...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the welfare effects of raising the retirement age. With aging populations, in many countries de iure retirement age has been raised. With a standard assumption that individuals prefer leisure to work, such policy necessitates some welfare deterioration....

This paper explores the relationship between ethnic competition and complementarity in returns to self-employment. We use detailed individual data from the U.S. censuses. We find that while in general business competition is detrimental to profitability, higher self-employment concentrations of...

Has the crisis indeed demonstrated that as profession we are misled by the beauty of the mathematical models and the only useful, workable solutions at hand were provided in early 1930s? The objective of this paper is to provide a review of the current state-of-the-art literature from the...

This paper uses the insights from the Optimal Speed of Transition literature to inquire the causes of relatively higher unemployment rate in a transition context. We study whether local variation in unemployment rates is related to labor turnover. In addition, the paper aims to assess the...

This study evaluates quantitatively the context of gender discrimination in transition countries in terms of access to the labor market. Over economic transition female labor market participation has generally weakened. Notwithstanding, transition countries differ in institutional design,...

We evaluate the welfare and macroeconomic effects of increasing the retirement age in the context of population aging. In an overlapping generations framework we simulate the increase of the retirement age by seven years under different pension systems (defined benefit, notionally defined...

Despite an apparent consensus in the literature that privatization leads to increased productivity and profitability of firms, the problem of endogeneity bias is profound and has been emphasized in a number of meta-analyses. We propose a new method to address the endogeneity bias and apply it to...

The raw gender wage gap over the period 1995-2012 amounts to app. 9% of hourly wage and is fairly stable. However, the raw gap does not account for differences in endowments between genders. In fact, the adjusted wage gap amounts to as much as 20% on average over the analyzed period and shows...