Mounting evidence suggests that excessive job protection reduces employment and labor market flows, hinders technological innovations, pushes workers into the informal sector, and hurts vulnerable groups by depriving them of job opportunities. Flexible labor markets stimulate job creation,...

The post-1990 period witnessed the adoption of economic reforms by many developing and transition countries. While some countries experienced a single-transition to a free-market system, others underwent a dual-transition to free-markets and democracy. This study examines India and Romania as...

Real wage declines have been common in the public sector in many countries over substantial periods of time. In several cases, such wage reductions have coincided with a decline in the efficiency of the public sector. In a simple analytical framework, it is shown that higher wage levels alter...

We estimate the impact of Internet diffusion on local firm performance in developing and transition economies, by adopting an instrumental variable approach reflecting firm's vulnerability to seismic shocks upon the telecommunications submarine cable (SMC) network. IV within fixed-effect...

This paper argues that institutional quality has both direct and indirect (moderating) effects on productivity of countries. These hypotheses are tested using a battery of institutional proxies (governance, economic freedom, intellectual property rights and ease of doing business) and two...