Since the beginning of transition in 1990 from a centrally planned to a market oriented economy, the performance of Poland's economy has been outstanding if we take GDP growth as our measure. In our opinion it is not specific reforms that can explain this performance but the radical ("big bang")...

Even though informal employment is wide-spread in transition economies the literature on this phenomenon in the region is rather scarce. For policy makers it is important to know the incidence and the determinants of informal employment. In the first part of the paper we demonstrate that its...

The paper analyzes the incidence, the severity and the determinants of household poverty in Ukraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measure poverty using income and consumption and contrast the effects of various poverty lines. Poverty in both periods...

Employment protection legislation aims to shield employees against unfair dismissal and earning reductions at the time of job loss. Theory suggests that employment protection stabilizes employment over cyclical upturns and downturns without necessarily increasing general unemployment. However,...

This paper revisits labor market effects of the minimum wage by taking advantage of a unique institutional setting and rich data from Russia that cover 89 regions over 10 years, from 2001 to 2010. Our empirical analysis draws on the methodology introduced by Neumark and Wascher, in which labor...